I was standing outside the hall with a fellow Ukipper yesterday, having a smoke, playing the "First they came for ..." game. I said "smokers", he said "hobby anglers" and so on until I got to "amateur photographers". This was a new one on him, so I gave a few examples, i.e. you aren't allowed to photograph police officers, government building or even people in the street (paedophile paranoia and invasion of privacy).
A Fellow Smoker overheard us and said it was more complicated than that (he was a hobby photographer and appeared to know what he was talking about). Photographing police officers is not against the law at all, they just smash your camera out of principle; photographing government buildings is a criminal offence (anti-terrorism - he was aware of one or two incidencts) and photographing people in the street is a civil offence rather than a criminal one (you're allowed to photograph them but not publish them; but this restriction does not apply to the "press", as defined). This all sounded like a bit of a mess to me, and he agreed. (Later in the evening, somebody else regaled us with a tale of somebody who had a visit from the police because he had taken photographs near a police station, I'm not sure how that ended but this is just to illustrate that it can and does happen).
OK, others know more about this topic than I do, but the punchline to this post is that when we told the fellow smoker, with whom we had chatted gaily about the police state, that we were there on UKIP business, he laughed and said that he was a hard-core Marxist.
It appeared to be completely lost on him that the fact he was forced to smoke outside in the drizzle and had to be a bit paranoid about what he should or shouldn't photograph was because the Marxists (or something akin to them) are in power.
What have we wrought in the UK?
7 hours ago
15 comments:
And this Marxist presumably has the vote, something else his kind don't believe in, unless it is just one name on the ballot paper!
Ye Gods!
Still I suppose we could always ban Marxists when we get into power? I jest, I jest!
Good lord you found a hard-core Marxist
I thought they were rarer than rocking horse shit and had gone the way of the Siberian Tiger in the wild.
In fact I thought the only chance of seeing one was in the Parlimetary Labour Party Machine or Union Management.
I hope you took a photo.
You'd be surprised how many people are just accepting of all the laws.
I've been in the UK a week now and people are puzzled about my attitude to democracy and freedom.
They've all been so successfully brainwashed, the concept of democracy has changed during the last few years.
The belief that it's all being done to "protect us", has been instilled deep in their psyche!
I know a few hard Marxists. When they realise I am a Conservative councillor, they go to great pains to tell me "I'm a REAL communist you know", right in my face. My response is usually "Your point is?" or "tell me what he said then".
I have only ever met one Marxist who had some idea of what Marx was actually saying. Its the same with Georgists too who invariably do not even understand the Law of Rent and then go on to say a single tax cannot collect all the rent. They have chosen not to think because its easier to do personal economy.
The point of this post is that we are verging on a police, Orwellian of controlling state? I don't think so. My view is that these effects are symptoms of a society in gradual decline. As a result of a refusal to adapt the systemic economic functions of tax, land and money, to harmonise with a society that can today produce a million times more wealth for the same effort say 300 years ago. The tendency then is for the non producer to take production from the producer in ever greater proportion. It appears as both corruption and chronic dysfunction in the agencies of authority. We cannot see the roots for the symptoms. If we chose not to think too, that makes it ever harder to see the cause.
Society will in the end fall, just like Rome, for the same reasons. Unless we have a revolution in thinking. And/or production makes such a huge advance that it stays ahead of the line of decline. Its exponential though so is just a matter of time.
Sorry for the long winded!
because the Marxists (or something akin to them) are in power.
C'mon, this is beneath you: as a regular poster on the merits of the Homeowners' Party (Red Wing) vs the Homeowners' Party (Blue Wing), you know perfectly well that we've got a populist, mildly-fascist party in power, governing primarily for the DM-reading lower-middle-class, and will continue to do so until/unless there's a revolution.
I agree that hard core Marxists (as opposed to idiots who think Trotsky must have been a environmentalist because he had a beard) aren't really what the government stands for. They are wrong because Marx didn't understand the value of competition & innovation in producing wealth. However there is little nanny-statism in Marx, no eco-fascism & would have understood nothing about modern "leftist" shibboleths like Gay Pride & bicycling. There is no political philosopher, not even Adam Smith as opposed to Luddism as Marx.
This government are not the advance guard of the working class but the bureaucratic parasitic class in full flow & they are no more Marxist in their attitude to the workers than they are "Green" in their attitude to covering the landscape with windmills, or "Liberal" in their attitude to banning things they just use all the slogans available.
Mark's biggest error in thought was his confusion of land with capital. And that the battle is not between labour and capital, but between labour and capital on the one side and monopoly on the other. That is all.
WFW, PC, S, you know what I mean.
RS, JB, Home-Owner-Ism is the ultimate cuckoo, it can masquerade as capitalism, environmentalism, fascism, socialism or marxism.
Home-Owner-Ism is a way of playing off the population against each other so that the politicians can get on with extending their powers, which as at today means banning as many things as possible, out of spite as much as anything. Whether they are banning new developments, smoking or amateur photography is neither here nor there.
NC, there are no fundamental differences between home-owner-ism (as exists in the UK today) and communism (as existed in Eastern bloc). Either way, the government tries to stay in power by restricting the growth of the economy - in the Eastern bloc, they did this with central planning of output, in the UK they do it by allowing NMBYs to block all new development. Either way, there is a class of people who profit disproportionately, despite the overall losses their policies entail.
RS, where on earth do you get that from? Land is land. Capital is capital. It is others who confuse 'private land ownership' with 'capital'.
Private land-ownership is effectively just privatised taxation, land is the natural source of tax revenue.
MW Oops apologies for that. I meant to say "Marx's biggest error"
Bloody hell sorry about that!!! (: As you know we are in complete agreement on that.
On the biggest cuckoo, is it not really commercial land. that is where most wealth is produced. therefore it commands the most rent
RS, now it makes sense, ta for clarification.
NIMBYists oppose the construction of new ports, runways, factories, offices as vehemently as they oppose new housing. And you can't generalise about what commands higher rents (residential or commercial) as the range of rents for either is from very small amounts to staggeringly large amounts.
Don't forget that to have 'production' you need a) a place of work and b) people to work there. There is some sort of equilibrium between residential and commercial land values.
Probably true mostly. Yet on the whole you can be general when you look at the proportions as opposed to the absolutes:
1) People live in low rent locations
2) People work in high rent locations
This is why 25% of energy demand goes wastefully to transport mostly.
"bugger the asthma and stress attacks, its 'cheaper' to drive 2 hours a day than pay more rent"
The NIMBY class represent a part of this but not all of it by any means.
It's a rum argument that Marxists can't be fascists. Benito started as a Marxist.
"NC, there are no fundamental differences between home-owner-ism (as exists in the UK today) and communism (as existed in Eastern bloc)."
Are you joking? We can vote here.
Did Marxists ban smoking? I don't think Stalin did.
But he did murder millions of producers and consumers. Very silly when they are demanding and supplying the wealth of a nation.
Much more useful than pesky smokers who by rights should be clocking out each time they head out for a puff
According to a recent study, daily smokers smoked an average of 19 cigarettes a day compared with 6 cigarettes a day for nondaily smokers on days that they smoked. 4 in 10 current smokers usually smoked fewer than 15 cigarettes a day, and about 4 in 10 usually smoked 15 to 24 a day.
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