We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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I know my Corbyn routine is getting old but he won’t stop sending me jokes Via JohnW and the rest of the internet,
Treat meat eaters like smokers, warns Jeremy Corbyn’s new vegan farming minister Kerry McCarthy
(Just a little note to the Telegraph subs: she isn’t actually farming minister yet. Labour would have to win an election for that.)
Meat should be treated like tobacco with a public campaign to stop people eating it, Jeremy Corbyn’s new vegan shadow farming minister has suggested. Kerry McCarthy, MP for Bristol East, has irked the British farming industry with her veganism and vice presidency of the anti-hunting League Against Cruel Sports.
In an interview with Viva!life, a magazine for vegans, she admitted she was a “militant” when it came to clamping down on meat consumption. She said: “I really believe that meat should be treated in exactly the same way as tobacco, with public campaigns to stop people eating it.”
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But I do treat meat-eaters the same way I treat smokers: with a big hug and a kiss.
1. Surely no one eats tobacco, screams my inner pedant, even old sea dogs in Tintin books only chewed it?
2. May we now appropriate the term ‘McCarthyism’ for this? ‘Are you now, or have you ever been, in a kebab shop?’.
3. Bristol East, any overlap with Bristol South East, the former seat of the former Viscount Stansgate, aka Anthony Wedgewood Benn?
4. Most Labour voters are so tribal that they probably would vote for this evil tyranny -it is not lunacy – anyway.
5. The evil ones are now blatant in their agitation for tyranny. They will devour the Green Party vote, lentils and all.
What bothers me more than anything is that, as a non-smoker, I’m always pushing against the villainization of smokers, while the vast majority of smokers I know shrug their shoulders and accept the role of villain, even the requirement to travel to the other side of the airport and stand outside in the snow and in the dark, 50ft away from the building to light one up. And when they greet me with “oh, I understand”, it quite honestly disgusts me.
And as another non-smoker I too find that things have become absurd. A dumb ‘world-class’ university in the Antipodes boasts a smoke-free campus (er, with some smoking shelters). I do not believe that they have roofed in Parkville under a dome… yet. Read the small print and their policies (several, incompatible) seek to ban smoking 5 or 6 ‘meters’ from building entrances (but many buildings are entered straight off the pavement – are they going to paint abortion-clinic red lines into the carriageway?), etc. The dumb swine can’t actually work out that an anti-tobacco and an anti-smoking policy are somewhat different, i.e. tobacco can be chewed, other substances can be smoked (and electronic cigarettes are yet to be invented).
Telegraph subs! Semi-literates incapable of understanding the reports for which they fabricate misleading headlines.
I am a cigarette smoker and a vegan, will you hug me or hate me?
Years back, when the vilification of smokers was getting under way, I remember dear old Auberon Waugh writing that he found the smells of burgers being eaten in trains far more offensive than tobacco smoke. I don’t think even that great satirist ever thought that the Labour Party would fall into the hands of people who actually believed that, and would act on it, but it seems this has come to pass. Still, in Venezuela no-one can afford meat, so perhaps the Corbyinistas will achieve their aim through economic disaster. I am sure we can rely on them to produce that.
Jim Jones, I will hug the smoker and hate the vegan (sanctimonious twits!).
Regardless of the banality of the intention, the premise is “force everyone to be like me”. Scratch the surface of any lefty and there will always be a rabid Stalinist trying to get out.
I eat meat very, very rarely and haven’t tried a cigarette in 50-odd years, though I do remember how foul they were. So I suppose on that basis I am more Labour than not.
But whenever a socialist says something petty like McCarthy has, I want to eat more meat and light up. This is what socialism does to people: it drives them to do the very opposite of what socialists demand for us all, though that’s no surprise as personal freedom and free choice is never very big in Liebore’s small world.
I blame me ballooning BMI on second hand bacon smells.
Its as scientific as second hand smoke studies.
At what point do Vegans become cannibals?
Genetherapy,
When they are very, very hungry and have got rid of all the CO2 in the atmosphere so they have no vegies……but they will only eat non-smokers!
To be fair she was not in the shadow cabinet when that interview was given, so it is a comment as an MP (for a trendy/deprived urban area) not a shadow minister.
But the fact she said this might have been something of which Mr Corbyn would have been aware (or should have been – I doubt he is that compotent), so should perhaps have made him pause. Then again, I doubt the farming and rural votes really bother him much. Indeed, so far I am having to conclude that votes as a whole are not a major consideration for him.
I am just waiting for them to find a justification to ban the air we breathe.
“What is fashionable in the universities does not matter”. So the “practical” people say.
Right now these Noam Chomsky reading scum (see “The Anti Chomsky Reader” for the truth about that the most cited “intellectual” in the modern West) control the Labour party.
A nice little economic collapse and they will “democratically” control Britain.
When they are putting millions into Pol Pot style extermination camps will it all be a funny joke then?
No wonder Max Keiser and the rest of Mr Putin’s “RT” are so pleased.
They can see the future – the future of horror in this country (and the West in general).
The see the future dead and dying.
And the prospect pleases them.
Maybe someone could write a dystopian future about a Green-Islam alliance ruling Britain, with more and more licences for everything, more surveillance, and more Government, except where they’re being tolerant of sharia customs. They’d end up fighting each other (Mohammedans want the West’s wealth, which is what the greeniacs want to get rid of), but they’d have finished Britain first.
Nicholas (Marvin) Gray: it may have escaped your notice at such a distance, but that sounds like many people’s view of Mr Cameron’s policies, albeit slightly more nuanced.
Marvin was really a depressed robot, not a paranoid one. Just fix some rose-coloured glasses over its’ photosensors, and Marvin would cheer up. As for Mr. Camel-Toe, he never sounds like a greenie or a mohammedanite, though I suppose you never can tell. Look how quick Mr. Obama was to invite a fellow muslim into the White House, that trainee bomb builder who was caught at school… Those Muslims stick together!
Well Mr Corbyn has now announced that he won’t use Trident were he Prime Minister.
Come, friendly bombs, and fall on the UK,
Mr Corbyn will let tyrants have their way…
Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: alter, sword and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! Raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
My sister: “I hope smoking is banned so I can quit”. I have nothing polite to say about this so I shan’t say anything. You feel free.
Well, I don’t know your sister, so I can’t testify as to her meaning.
But I myself could easily say something like that, purely in the spirit of poking fun at myself for not quitting even though I know I should*.
(In fact, “There oughtta be a law” is something that I as well as lots of other people say, purely jokingly. For instance, there ought to be a law that no one else may use the roads when I am. I tend to think of this especially when trying to get from A to B during rush hour.)
The only other possibility that occurs to me seems rather far-fetched: The sister’s friends are smokers too, and all feel rather outcast and refuse to let themselves be socially blackmailed, so continue — even though one or more, personally, really would like to quit. A legal ban would give them the excuse to do so without letting down the side.
Or, the only other possibility (in my vicinity, it is often true that 1=2=3) is that she was simply making an oblique comment about the current State of Everything with the Nanny State and the various moral panics that demand it, and what these Moral Panics are doing to people’s heads.
*Actually I did quit, 10 years ago.