What the Green Movement Got Wrong

A documentary with this very title is to be broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK this Thursday.  This article in the Daily Telegraph summarises the key point of the broadcast - that environmentalists were wrong to oppose nuclear power and genetically modified crops.

American activist Stewart Brand said "Environmentalists did harm by being ignorant and ideological and unwilling to change their mind based on actual evidence. As a result we have done harm and I regret it."

None of this is news to me, since identifying the ideological rather than the evidential behind environmentalist claims is rather easy.  Jeanette Fitzsimons, the former Green MP, was a master at this, claiming 1999 was the last Christmas to enjoy potatoes "you could trust".   One of the reasons minds have been changed on GM foods for example, is because people have been eating them for over a decade, without a shred of evidence of any ill health effects.

However, beyond that documentary one of the latest scientific breakthroughs will help put paid to the myth that new roads shouldn't be built, because the "inevitable" end of cheap oil will mean private motoring will be too expensive for most people.

According to Geek.com, DBM Energy, a manufacturer of batteries for forklifts, decided to trial its rechargeable battery in a car.  An Audi A2.  The result?  A battery cheaper than existing Lithium Ion technology in cars, with a range of 375 miles (603 kms), averaging at 55 mph (89 km/h) on a charge of 6 minutes.  Now obviously there are a few steps to take before this becomes mass production, but a future of rechargeable cars might just have moved a little closer. (more on UPI)

Is the US about to experience a minor revolution?

Janet Daley in the Sunday Telegraph thinks the mid-term elections might just mean that.

"It was widely known in Europe that the American Left hated George Bush (and even more, Dick Cheney) because of his military adventurism. What was less understood was that the Right disliked him almost as much for selling the pass over government spending, bailing out the banks, and failing to keep faith with the fundamental Republican principle of containing the power of central government. So the Republicans are, if anything, as much in revolt against the establishment within their own party as they are against the Democrats. " 

The sheer simple ignorance of many to think this is simply another swing away from the Democrats to the Republicans.  It is something rather different..

 
"One of the more electorally far-reaching effects of this is that Republicanism could become the home once again of a plausible political and economic programme, rather than simply an outpost for those who seem to reject many of the features of modern life. The gun-toters and gay-bashers and pro-lifers may have jumped aboard the bandwagon, and Sarah Palin may be frantically attaching herself to the parade, but this is not their show: the Tea Party protests began (as their name suggests) as a campaign against high taxation and the illegitimate intrusiveness of federal powers. That is what they are still about"

Quite right.  It is not something to fear, it will not match either Bush era, and could be far more useful than the Reagan Administration in shrinking the state.

Obama doesn't know what to do with it.  So he is playing the game of saying it is a repeat of the Bush years on offer.  He is so wrong.  The Tea Party is not about more government, it is about less.  It isn't about trusting politicians to effect change, but about getting politicians out of the way.  The problem Obama has (and most Democrats) is that this simply does not compute - their brains don't understand that they are the problem, their politics and their solutions are not what is wanted.   That what people want is government to stop picking winners, stop supporting losers, to stop increasing the Federal debt and to pay less tax.  They actually do believe people should reap the rewards of their efforts, and bear the consequences of their losses, and that people are inherently benevolent and will look after each other without the state.

If Obama faces both the House and the Senate, controlled by individuals who believe this, then his philosophy will face complete gridlock.   The big question that will remain is who can the Republicans pick to stand for the Presidency?

Charity for north Korea

Want a good charity to support the beleagured folk in North Korea?  You could do worse than "Love North Korean Children" a charity established by a British Korean man who is establishing bakeries to supply food directly to children in impoverished areas.   Not only is it feeding children who otherwise would struggle to get sufficient nutrition, but it is also giving them positive contacts with the outside world.  It is not food with state propaganda, and does not get diverted to the military or the party. 

The more of that positive foreign contact the better.

The left panic over the Tea Party

Daniel Hannan once again writes brilliantly in the Daily Telegraph summarising much of the media coverage of the Tea Party in the past year or so.   It went through the phases of:

- Ignoring the Tea Party as irrelevant;

- Smearing Tea Party members as uneducated redneck country hicks (don't ever say those on the left are liberal and treat everyone as equal);

- Laughing at how the Tea Party was going to make the Republicans extremist and unelectable; and now

- Warning that Tea Party members are stupid and are being conned by a "big corporation" (successful large businesses are evil) conspiracy to take over and run their lives.

He points out at today's Guardian article by leftwing armageddonist George Monbiot (remember him? The same man who preached self immolation saying "It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves") who says the Tea Party is an exercise in "false consciousness".

Really George?  Yes, believe it or not, he believes that specific billionaires and major companies are driving the agenda, which includes "big government", and duping millions of Americans in the process.  Such stupid little people, don't know when they are being conned.  Good job there is an elite in the media and academia, as well as well intentioned and incorruptible leftwing politicians to look after their interests.

Quite why "billionaires and big business", which has been spending money on politics for a very long time is now suddenly being successful isn't clear, except that Monbiot treats the language of free markets, small government and fiscal austerity as being "the same" as what the Bush Administration and previous Republican Administrations did.   All of which is demonstrably false.

Monbiot's demon is that businesses seek to make money at the expense of their customers, employees and the places they locate.   That businesses destroy and that their wealth creation is a zero sum game, which also involves destruction and theft from others.  It is the scapegoat that Monbiot applies to the world, and so he links the corrupt and statist actions of some businesses (which continue in the form of constant pleadings for subsidies and protectionism by some), to the agenda of the Tea Party, and does so by dismissing freedom, free markets and less government as taking from the poor, and about power moving from government ("good") to companies ("bad).   

The implication goes further than that, as Hannan explains, because it embraces the idea that democracy is fundamentally flawed.  That the average person doesn't know what is good for them, and so votes against her interests because of "false consciousness".  This is where the term "Democratic People's Republic" has relevance.

The core philosophical basis for all of the Marxist-Leninist totalitarian dictatorships of the 20th century (and the few that remain) is that the interests of the people are served only by a single political party that ostensibly represents their interests and acts on their behalf.  That party is an expression of the "general will", and so any who go against the party are acting not only against the interests of the "people" and "society", but themselves.  This is why many in those regimes were treated, not as political prisoners, but psychiatric patients.   It was literally considered insane to go against a party that had everyone's best interests at heart.  In an environment where truth was manufactured and controlled (because of the risk that inconvenient truths would empower those who wish to exploit and manipulate the people, and so be against their interests), it turned everything upside down.

This is what Monbiot is claiming from the Tea Party, that millions of "ordinary people" (unlike he, who knows best) are being fooled and tricked against their best interests by evil people whose only intent is not to do what they say, but to use government to enrich themselves.  

Quite what he would want to do about it, when Tea Party members themselves agree with the objectives of the Tea Party, when they want fiscal responsibility, free markets and less government, and vote accordingly, is unclear.   

Following on from that, worshippers of big government, ever increasing public debt and higher taxes have formed the "Coffee Party" as a lame attempt to raise support for their side.  One only needs to read that the Coffee Party believes "that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will" to notice that the connections between the Coffee Party's philosophy and that of Marxism are rather clear.  There is, of course, no such thing as a collective brain, and so what this really means is not that millions of people's wills are expressed through government (in fact the free market), but that a few hundred politicians vote for the policies they espouse and bind everyone else in the process.   If a majority want to take more money from a minority, or give more of someone else's money to a minority, or regulate a minority, then they can.  Without constitutional limits on this to protect fundamental individual rights, the risks are clear that government can become a tyranny of the majority.   

Clearly those who embrace tax and bigger government are panicking.  Panicking that their self-deluded belief that things can only get better if only they could spend other people's money where it would "do good", prohibit things that are "bad" and promote things that are "good", is no longer being supported.  Panicking that a lot of Americans are seeing the Federal deficit and debt and asking the reasonable question "when does this have to be paid, who pays it".

Panicking that Americans don't want corporate bailouts, don't want politicians using the government to pay minority interests other people's money, and that they actually truly do believe that the free market offers the best opportunities for economic growth, prosperity and the right to live one's life as one sees fit.

Why does the left peddle such vacuous hatred?

So asks Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan in his Daily Telegraph blog:

He asks why he finds that "high-minded causes attract adherents who are looking for a way to validate their sociopathic tendencies, to feel good about the fact that they dislike so many of their fellow human beings. "

He cites the language used in various articles by some from the left " this one by the Labour MP Tristram Hunt, in which he claims that the Conservatives want to return to Victorian workhouses; this one, in which Polly Toynbee talks about the Tories’ “final solution for the poor”; this one, in which Labour’s John Cruddas talks about a million people being driven from their homes “as a result of the Coalition’s savage attack on the poor”.

Do those on the left really believe their vacuous rhetoric that those who are not on the left hate the poor, want them to suffer and (in the case of Toynbee's vile but carefully chosen words) want them exterminated?

As much as I oppose the welfare state it is not motivated by hatred or disinterest in those who are worse off than myself.   Even the trimming of the welfare state being implemented in the UK (largely about those who are on higher incomes claiming benefits and those claiming more than the average wage in total benefits) are seen as being a "savage attack" on the poor.

The left does not have a monopoly on compassion, indeed the speed and voracity at which it turns on those who dare to disagree with its solutions shows how shallow that "compassion" actually is.  How many on the left talk of dancing on Margaret Thatcher's grave, how many on the right talk the same about Tony Benn, George Galloway or Arthur Scargill?

The assumption of evil intent on the behalf of those not part of the left, and those who do not share the "correct line" is malignant and destructive.  It is used by media with a leftwing tendency such as the BBC to create a basic binary debate that puts the leftwing statist solutions against those who simply water those solutions down, rather than those who say the statist solutions are morally and practically wrong.  However, most of all it is a tool to provoke vapid emotional responses, particularly to spread fear among the less educated.   

Far easier to tell those on low incomes how much the government is hurting them, how much they are ignored, neglected and going to be harmed by a heartless government, than to engage on how the budget deficit should be cut.   Leftist tacticians know very well that playing to emotions, simple slogans about the right being "for the rich" and about "enriching their rich mates" provoke an instant response of hatred and disdain.   They also know that they can dismiss and ignore talk about real economic issues (which most people know little about) by using the language of "caring".

It's simply sad that far too many let them get away with this.   The simple question any journalist could ask leftwing activists who seek more government spending is "why don't you spend more of your own money or raise your own money from donations?".   This question exposes the point that the interest is not in outcomes, but means. 

UPDATE 1:  Deputy PM Nick Clegg has taken the vile Labour MP Chris Bryant on for saying that the new housing policy means the poor are "socially engineered and sociologically cleansed out of London". Shades of Bosnia when the Serb nationalist thugs rounded up Bosnian Muslim men and boys, took them out of towns and executed them.   Clegg pointed out that the new policy is about no longer subsidising people with housing benefit to live in areas where employed people on average incomes couldn't afford to live.   Again, leftwing politicians use the language of genocide (not unlike the use of the term "climate deniers") to criticise those who they disagree with.