Quotulatiousness

September 7, 2023

The not-at-all hidden authoritarian desires of the climate activists

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill on the increasingly blatant wish of the comfortable greenies to impose actual judicial punishment on those who disagree with their agenda:

Greens have been dreaming about jailing “climate criminals” for a very long time. Climate-change deniers in particular will “one day have to answer for their crimes”, said eco-author Mark Lynas a few years back. Well, Gaia’s authoritarian army might finally be getting its way. The new Energy Bill currently before the UK House of Commons provides for “the creation of criminal offences”, possibly including jail time, where there is “non-compliance” with energy-saving regulations. Shorter version: keep the lights on for too long and you could end up in the slammer.

The Telegraph is reporting that property owners who fail to adhere to “energy-performance regulations” could “face prison” under the government’s crazy plans. There is concern that homeowners, landlords and business bosses could be whacked with fines of up to £15,000 or a year behind bars if they fall foul of regulations on energy consumption. The government says it has no plans to make it a crime to be an eco-unfriendly user of light and heat, but the bill allows for the creation of such crimes. And this has rattled some MPs. They’re concerned that ministers would be able to “create new offences with limited parliamentary scrutiny” thanks to the new bill.

What is the aim of all this tightening of the screws on energy use? Of the possible future criminalisation of us thieves of heat and light? To help Britain reach its Net Zero targets, of course. Like other Western nations, we’re committed to achieving Net Zero emissions by 2050. And if that means strongarming the little folk into reducing their energy use, so be it. Let’s be clear about what the new bill’s provision for the creation of crimes really represents: the state threatening to punish anyone who refuses to convert to the religion of Net Zero and to sacrifice their energy to the jealous god of environmentalism.

We can now see the iron fist in the green glove. There’s been a creeping criminalisation of eco-disobedient behaviour for some time now. In the UK, we’ve had “rubbish police” looking through people’s bags of trash and slapping them with a £100 fine if they are not properly recycling plastic and paper. Under Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes, officious local councils erect eyesore bollards to stop people from driving on certain roads, and fine them if they fail to comply. In recent years, more than a million such fines have been served on defiers of the LTN regime, raising more than £100million for the Net Zero cultists who rule over us.

Then there’s London mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), now expanded to cover every inch of London. Hundreds of cameras have been installed across the capital, a vast infrastructure of Stasi-like watchmen, to ensure that drivers of “dirty” vehicles have paid the daily ULEZ toll of £12.50. A fine of £500 awaits any driver of a sinful car who hasn’t. To those saying “Of course the government isn’t going to fine people for un-green behaviour!”, wake up – officialdom has been doing this for years.

How Britain Helped the Communist Revolution – War Against Humanity 113

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, Greece, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 6 Sep 2023

Fight the Nazis or fight your countrymen? From Marshal Tito’s Partisans in Yugoslavia to the ELAS fighters in Greece, that is the animating question among the Balkans resistance movements. For many, the question is already answered. It is Mihailović and his Chetniks and EDES, EKKA, and the Greek royalist government who must be out-maneuvered first. British foreign policy has so far failed to change this state of affairs, can Churchill get his SOE officers to stop these civil wars?
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J.R.R. Tolkien was completely at odds with the literati of his day

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Sebastian Milbank marks the 50th anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien:

J.R.R. Tolkien

A romantic Edwardian, steeped in Northern European folklore and Victorian literature, Tolkien was and is despised by large parts of the fashionable literary establishment. I have known very few neutral reactions to his work. People either love or loathe Lord of the Rings, which seems doomed to eternally inspire adoration or ire, and nothing much in between.

The often ferocious response of many critics perhaps stemmed from the apparent anachronism of the book, combined with its massive popularity. It was published in 1954, at a time when literary modernism was dominant and pervading the academy. Modernist writers were obsessed with interiority, broke with prior literary convention, and traded in irony, ambiguity and convoluted psychology. Literary critics of the time were taking up the “New Criticism”, which dispensed not only with the previous generation’s fascination with historical context in favour of close reading, but also with the traditionalist concerns for beauty and moral improvement, which were regarded as subjective and emotionally driven. Spare, complex prose, focused on the darker side of society, was in vogue. Into this context dropped 1,200 pages of dwarves, elves and hobbits in a grand battle of good and evil. They were greeted with the sort of enthusiasm one can imagine.

Edmund Wilson called the books “balderdash”, a battle between “Good people and Goblins”. The book’s morality was a sticking point even for the most sympathetic critics, with Edwin Muir lamenting that “his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immovably evil”. As his work travelled into the 60s, political problems cropped up, with one feminist critic writing a book-length attack on the series to denounce it as “irritatingly, blandly, traditionally masculine”.

The mystery of how a book can so sharply divide opinion is answered perhaps by how profoundly original and unusual The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s wider legendarium are. They are shamelessly moralistic, written on the basis of exhaustive literary theory, linguistics, geography and world-building, and quite devoid of social commentary or Empsonian irony. Yet they are as much a radical departure from prior literary forms as modernist literature itself is, making the book doubly at odds with prevailing style and doubly original.

The moralism of Tolkien’s work is not, as some critics seem to suppose, the product of schoolboy simplicity. It is far too rigorous for that. So morally charged and orchestrated is the novel, that it would be numbered amongst the small number of works that might have passed Plato’s test for literature. Not only is this in respect of its exacting honouring of good characters and depreciation of wicked ones within its narrative framework, but equally in Tolkien’s utter refusal of allegory, thus meeting Plato’s challenge that poets are dangerous imitators of the world.

History Summarized: Iceland’s Hallgrimskirkja

Filed under: Americas, Architecture, Europe, History, Humour, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 26 May 2023

The name is more visually complicated than the church itself.
I tried my best to pronounce all the Icelandic correctly but that LL sound is TRICKY.

SOURCES & Further Reading:
Great Courses lectures “Iceland’s Independence” and “The Capital and Beyond in Southwest Iceland” from The Great Tours Iceland by Jennifer Verdolin, “Iceland’s Hallgrimskirkja” from World’s Greatest Churches by William R. Cook. Plus, two visits to Iceland and a lot of time spent staring at the thing.
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QotD: Techno-pessimism

Filed under: Business, History, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Unfortunately, by any objective measure, most new things are bad. People are positively brimming with awful ideas. Ninety percent of startups and 70 percent of small businesses fail. Just 56 percent of patent applications are granted, and over 90 percent of those patents never make any money. Each year, 30,000 new consumer products are brought to market, and 95 percent of them fail. Those innovations that do succeed tend to be the result of an iterative process of trial-and-error involving scores of bad ideas that lead to a single good one, which finally triumphs. Even evolution itself follows this pattern: the vast majority of genetic mutations confer no advantage or are actively harmful. Skepticism towards new ideas turns out to be remarkably well-warranted.

The need for skepticism towards change is just as great when the innovation is social or political. For generations, many progressives embraced Marxism and thought its triumph inevitable. Future generations would view us as foolish for resisting it — just like Thoreau and the telegraph. But it turned out that Marxism was a terrible idea, and resisting it an excellent one. It had that in common with virtually every other utopian ideal in the history of social thought. Humans struggle to identify where precisely the arc of history is pointing.

Nicholas Phillips, “The Fallacy of Techno-Optimism”, Quillette, 2019-06-06.

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