Some things of possible interest. Among them, this:
Readers may wish to ponder Mr Monbiot’s urge to romanticise poverty and pre-modern living, an urge perhaps best expressed in his claim that “we” should be more like the peasants of Southern Ethiopia, who “smile more often” than we do and whose fields “crackle with laughter.” These noble, laughing peasants may live in homes constructed from leaves and packing cases, and they may have Stone Age sanitation and alarming child mortality, but at least they’re not being “isolated” by sinful material trappings, like dentistry, double glazing and TV remote controls. Think I’m kidding? Think again.
In hot countries, double glazing is not necessary. It is very useful here. Monbiot, like all idiot eco-leftists, romanticize feudalism, and think they would be the feudal lord.
It is no coincidence the name Monbiot so closely resembles “moonbat”.
“moonbat” is right.
No doubt he also approves of everyone having an early death.
The “happy peasant” is a trope you see often in Lefty Ivory Tower arguments. All this technology is “dehumanizing”, they say.
When you meet one of these Ivory Tower ginks in Real Life, they always have soft, pretty hands.
Aye, to all above.
Get the same kind of crap from champagne socialists on the Cuba topic even though most have never been there: “But they’re happy.”
My answer: “Oh Yeah? Other than a government tour guide, give me the name of one Cuban who told you that.”
Clavin? Is that you?
It’s a derivative of JJ Rousseau’s “Noble Savage”. The Left, particularly the Aristocratic Left, has been carrying this nonsense around for more than two centuries. There’s an entire pastoral literature built on this crapola, which is why court aristocrats would have parties mimicking the lifestyle of shepherds.
Romanticising poverty is a particular disease of those who live off its avails but have never actually been in that condition.
If the conditions that the ‘noble savage’ lives in are so romantic and desirable then why don’t the champagne socialists go live there? Oh yeah, it’s because those harsh conditions are meant for the lesser people not them.
Monbiot is not alone in his moaning about modern living. I do it myself. However, having a lot of experience in different jobs and living conditions I can tell you that it is good old manual outside labour, esp with others that makes one more happier.
Monbiot’s moaning is right on! Don’t you just hate those factory made goods, laundry machines, horseless carriages and other modern frippery. Really isn’t a nice manually made loin cloth (washed on a rock in the creek) more satisfying than store-bought trousers? Who wants to use a chainsaw when he could hew down trees with a hand-made axe and drag them out of the woods with a mule?
But Monbiot’s moaning about modern conveniences ruining our formerly bucolic way of life pales before his alarm about what we’ve done to the climate:
“CATASTROPHIC CLIMATE BREAKDOWN…global temperature rises, the melting of ice sheets and sea ice, the retreat of the glaciers, the rising and acidification of the oceans and the changes in weather patterns. The message is familiar and shattering: It’s as bad as we thought it was…the only effective means of preventing climate breakdown is to leave fossil fuels in the ground.”
WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!
Rousseau never crossed the Atlantic to actually see the ‘noble savage’ to observe their culture firsthand just as Hillary ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ Clinton and George Moonbat have never been to Africa to observe the subjects of their theories first hand.
I’m sure that if you asked the average poor African whether they would like to work in the field every day just to survive while being at the mercy of drought, famine, plague and warlords or would like to work a 40hr week, have all their children survive and have the choice of eating at a restaurant they would choose the latter.
Monbiot exposes the thinly disguised contempt for the masses that typifies the “enlightened” ruling class progressives. When you deprecate the lives of the common man it becomes much easier to rationalize herding them into cattle cars or killing fields. Green theocracy gives them the “spiritual” strength for their planned future planetary “cleansing” (green Holocaust). Don’t confuse crazy with evil. Energy poverty is just the beginning.
Why is it that one gets this almost uncontrollable urge to rhyme the name of this character with a medical condition?
Is it something he just said?
Or is it something more constant?
“…one gets this almost uncontrollable urge to rhyme the name of this character with a medical condition.”
I’ll, ahem, bite.
A sorry wee dipper named Monibot
Was worried to death about drips he caught.
He went to the Doc,
Who said “…………..
……………………………….
Yeah, this looks like fun. I’d love to see Monbiot give it a try:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdLtWuf5yEg
“No doubt he also approves of everyone having an early death.”
Let me correct that for you, Ken:
“No doubt he also approves of everyone else having an early death.”
As P.J. O’Rourke once wrote, for people of Monbiot’s ilk it’s always:
“Just enough of me. Far too much of you.”
Moonbats like Monbiot think that all westerners are unhappy because they are unhappy. They should start hanging with conservatives and libertarians. The poor in Africa are happy because they are not ‘progressives’. Monbiot’s view is a common refrain of Libs. I was watching ‘Mine Your Own Business’ the other day and was reminded of this in a segment when they interviewed a regional director of an NGO in Madagascar and he spewed the same inanity.
I think this pretty well sums up what Mr Monbiot’s believes.
to him this is educational, not a parody.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCQIGiXf0JA
You know I was actually impressed by this guy. Living in such a primitive way on a street
His attention to being sanitary with a needle using bleach was impressive.
The reason he had the women swish the bleach around her mouth is because it kills any infection. Dentists here routinely use bleach on root canals to kill any roots left.
Having had adult teeth pulled out. It hurts like nothing else.
It feels no better than what she felt, but in an comfortable chair.
I wouldn’t mind hearing from a real dentist what he though of the procedure.
This is why air-lifting leftists/liberals to X global hotspot is so important. If Georges Monbiot believes in the myth of the “happy poor”, he can live among them.
The tired old attacks on “consumerism” serve at least two purposes:
(1) an attempt to demoralize those of us living in a western society with a reasonably high standard of living;
(2) to prepare us for, or accustom us to, the deprivation that will inevitably result under full-fledged socialism.