Wednesday
May062015
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill There's something about Bristol
May 6, 2015 Climate: Parliament Energy: gas Ethics There is a really violent undercurrent to this election:
Vandals targeted a Conservative MP days before the election by deliberately flooding her garden with 1,300 litres of sticky oil.
Last week cars belonging to Ms Leslie and her elderly father Ian, 70, were daubed with paint and the words 'Tory Scum' were scrawled along the bodywork.
Charlotte Leslie has written about her shock at finding that vandals had punctured the oil tank in her garden, causing her parents' entire heating supply for the year to seep into the ground.
The thuggery seems to have been prompted by Ms Leslie's support for unconventional oil and gas development. In other words it's the environmentalists again.
Reader Comments (72)
@ JamesG
Which end of the political spectrum would be most likely to vandalise the property of a pro-fracking Conservative MP?
@JamesG
"...it was the communists who were most responsible for defeating them."
The Nazis were defeated by communists? Did you miss the US role in WWII or do you consider the US a communist country? Please explain in coherent detail.
Oh dear,
"A bit too much wild extrapolation here"
......Yes indeed - you mean like; "runaway man made warming is going to end life as we know it, humankind gone whatev too" sort of thing?
Burke, is reputed to have once said:
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.”
Communism, Nazism, Corporatism, Statism, Socialism, Cultural Marxism......+ maybe extreme Environ-mentalism are all horses from the same stable, are they not?
My apologies for sending this thread into a Lewandowsky wet dream.
I forget sometimes that holding different political views can lead to extreme prejudice in some people.
Especially around election times.
Hardly surprising when for a couple of decades now the central purpose of our schools has been to systematically brainwash children with evil drivel about the world they live in accordance with Green Party doctrine. Can we really be surprised when some of their number, the dimmer ones, believe this sick bilge and act accordingly? They've been taught that if they failed to regurgitate green crap on demand they would fail their examinations and their future careers would be blighted accordingly. And after all they are hardly going to learn the truth from the Bolshevik Broadcast Conglomeration, and the lame stream media are hardly any better than that.
@ JamesG: The Red Army did indeed play a significant role in the defeat of Nazi Germany, however, whilst I do not belittle the bravery & indeed tactics employed by that Army, they were driven more by fear than pure bravery. Every section of the Army had its Party Member, there not to encourage per se but more to ensure no subordination took place, & to ensure any that ocurred was brutally punished. Stalin was a good tactician, but not militarily, but politically. He set his two leading generals against each other by engendering rivalry, & both knew what the price of failure was. The US Army, whilst able to take the casualties, did so with a concience. The Red Army literlaly threw lives away because it could afford to!
As I have said before, the greatest triumph of the left was to paint the National Socialtist party as a party of the far right, when they in fact believed in the almighty power of the State, they wanted the youth to not look to their parents & families for solutions to perceived problems, but to look to the State for solutions. Sounds pretty darned left-wing to me!
"to seep into the ground"
And ground-water. How ironic.
James is right about the communists, lovely fluffy defenders of all that is good.
I'm sure their lining up and executing the anarcho-syndicalist POUM fighters at the end of the Spanish Civil war was merely one of many blips on their otherwise unblemished record. Luckily, they're also very good at rewriting history, so it's all good in the end...
Brute
It would be true to say that warfare on the Eastern Front in WWII was on an altogether larger scale. The sustained campaigns went on for longer, involved vast land armies, and covered greater distances and geographical areas. Vastly more civilians were slaughtered in the East. However it is also true that the West made a huge contribution to Soviet war effort by supplying Russia with enormous quantities of arms. Many thousands of fighters and bombers were supplied to the communists by the free nations they despised and it was done at great cost. Where they would have been without that support I can only guess. In fact it is extraordinary that this tiny beleaguered, blockaded nation should have manufactured thousands of aircraft and sent them via the Northern convoys when it needed them so badly itself - and that to a vastly bigger and more populous country, albeit one crippled by socialism.
The insurance company will insist on all the contaminated soil being excavated and disposed of 'environmentally' and a new oil tank installed. The bill will be for tens of thousands. The police will do nothing.
what a waste of a thread. Nazi comparisons are supremely silly, because analogies only get one so far, and total identification is historical revisionism.
Pointman's leave-morality-aside attitude makes him the actual equivalent of a Greenie. I for one don't want to share much if anything with anyone who's got more pressing things to do then figure out what are our moral limits in the course of saving the world from climate change, or from the Greens.
My litmus test is simple: is a person convinced the world is on the path to ruin? If they are, then their humane side goes.
Here in the US we use security/surveillance cameras to catch/stop vandals. Perhaps set the blokes up for another attack, and catch them this time.
Alan the Brit:
Indeed. Check out Daniel Hannan's excellent post on this topic:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100260720/whenever-you-mention-fascisms-socialist-roots-left-wingers-become-incandescent-why/
Things don't change. When I was at University in the 1970s an extreme left wing fellow student on my course told me that he wanted to find out who the students were who were members of the Federation of Conservative Students and go round to the car park and damage their vehicles. These extremists use their 'ideologies' as an excuse to vent their hostile and flawed characters.
@Martin Reed
Indeed.
@Tammly
Some people are like that regardless of the "politics" they claim justify their actions. You can find them acting with equal violence while under the cover of religion or fashion. Yesterday they provoked you by blowing smoke on your face, today they scream at you for lighting a cigarette. Yesterday they were found lynching people of "color", today they want to lynch "climate deniers".
that seeping tank probably caused more damage than all fracking sites together.
Entertaining political food fight. Fun, as long as all you want to do is get it off your chest.
Political views are multi-dimensional, and flattening them down to some left/right spectrum is an over simplification. Arnold Kling's Econtalk discussion on The Three Languages of Politics offers some interesting thoughts on why political arguments often go nowhere.
For many years now, when I have seen a comparative or superlative (best cricketer, worse car, etc.) I've been in the habit of mentally asking "along what axis". To compare requires that you could take all the cars or cricketers in the world and put them in a list from worst to best. Can't be done without defining an axis. A Ferrari isn't a wise choice for towing a boat. So, what axis?
It was only when I heard Kling's talk that I realised how applicable this approach was to politics -- that people were using completely different bases for their good/bad or right/wrong or just/unjust axis.
Mind you, for knocking holes in someone's oil tank to be on the "good" end suggests a very strange axis.
@geoffchambers
...
Several thousand died on Kristallnacht. No-one dies when Western politicians or climate scientists say something stupid. ...
"No-one IN THE WEST dies when Western politicians or climate scientists say something stupid."
There. Fixed that for you...
@Tammly
...When I was at University in the 1970s an extreme left wing fellow student on my course told me that he wanted to find out who the students were who were members of the Federation of Conservative Students and go round to the car park and damage their vehicles.
And so you gave him the car numbers of the Head of the Student Union and the Head of the Faculty....?
Bristol, isn't that where Lew and other climate change nutters are entrenched at the university?
Interesting to note that the Greens made some gains in the local elections in Bristol though they lost overall control of Brighton & Hove even though Lucas increased her vote.
she retained her seat with an increased majority due to the Liberal vote collapsing, and she picked up more of those voters than the Labour party did. Con 44%, Lab 34%, UKIP 9.5%
so the total Green/left vote was Lab/Lib/Green 46%..
BTW her fiancee is a BBC presenter who the BBC controversially moved from his job during the election.. for impartiality they said