Atticus Fox

We used to make decisions based on ‘the greater good’. The idea behind this approach is an acceptance that you are not going to be able to please all the people, all the time. As such, you make decisions that will benefit the greater majority of people. It’s an approach that parallels the cost benefit analyses that drive business decisions. If the amount of good – aka ‘benefit’ – brought about by this decision hugely outweighs the amount of harm – ie ‘cost – then the decision is a good one: the decision is for the greater good.

However, recently a schism has been rent across the common-sense continuum. More and more examples are cropping up whereby decisions are made based on the lesser good. The modus operandi of this approach are that a decision is beneficial if a small number of people derive a benefit.

An example of this approach in practise relates to the ever-growing influence of transgenderism on our society.

Toilets and changing rooms becoming unisex which makes tiny numbers of people slightly happier whilst making huge numbers of people uneasy, uncomfortable, vulnerable and slightly resentful that rules that have been fixed in our society for hundreds of years are being changed to appeal to such small numbers.

And does this change really make transgenders feel less oppressed? I would guess that the simmering resentment that the majority would have at this upheaval of custom and tradition would be more than enough to make transgenders feel oppressed all over again.

It seems like a political decision that is more about virtue-signalling.

There is a lot of inconsistency in the environmental movement. Inconsistency where the solution to an environmental issue has an even larger environmental impact. Allow me to relate an example…
I went to a local festival over the summer. I went with my wife and we met our friends there. It’s an annual event, organised by the local council in a large park. This year, upon entry, every attendee was given a small, thickly-padded plastic envelope.

The purpose of the envelope was to store cigarette butts: instead of dropping your ciggie butt on the ground after a relaxing and pleasurable smoke, Festival-Goers were expected to extinguish the ciggie and then place the butt in the envelope. If everything went according to plan, there would be no ciggie butts left on the ground after the festival.
This envelope led me to consider the ecological vandalism of the envelope versus the ecological destruction of the ciggie butts. I know that ciggie butts are made from a type of plastic – cellulose acetate – that takes many years to decompose. Also, during decomposition, toxins – from both the plastic and the residual tobacco – would leach into the ground. However, how many ciggie butts would need to collected to offset the total environmental damage – both past and future – of the indestructable envelope? Also, the park in which we were cavorting wasn’t used for farming: no grazing took place there. No wheat was grown there. So what ecological impact was there, in real terms?
At some point all of the padded envelopes will be thrown away. How do you assess whether the envelopes saved more ecological damage than they caused? How many ciggie butts would need to taken away from my local park in order to justify the production of thick plastic envelopes? Plus, the widely different lifespans of the envelopes needs to be considered: some envelopes *may* be used multiple times, whereas many will just be used on the day they are received. I would guess that lots would never be used at all.
I was certainly incredulous: the envelope appeared to be virtually indestructable. It was a thickly padded item. I assume the padding was to absorb any residual heat from a newly extinguished butt. As such, it occurred to me that, once the envelope had served out its useful life, it would take hundreds of years to decompose. There were no recycling instructions on the item. As such, it appeared that these envelopes could not be shipped off to the 3rd World, to be recycled into to some other kind of plastic tat (or, as is more likely, to be dumped in the ocean). No, the envelope would end up in landfill in the UK. And how long would be the useful life of this product? How many would be dug out of a drawer for every similar outdoor event in the future, maybe being used tens of times during the life of the recipient? Would repeated use of this kind justify the production of more indestructible plastic? Maybe, I don’t know. I guess it depends on how you measure it. Sure, plastic toxins would no longer leach into the ground in parks but, the butts would stiĺl be decomposing in landfill. Not to mention the envelope. What about the people who only used the envelope on the day of issue and then threw it in the bin once they arrived home? Would the envelope have paid for itself in this situation? No. And then there are all those people – either smokers or non-smokers – that would have immediately thrown the envelope away in contempt. Now the council has an even bigger clean-up operation.
The council had decided that the solution to the presence of indestructable plastic was to produce even more indestructable plastic. This isn’t solving the problem. This is simply passing the problem on to somewhere else. Correction: by producing yet more plastic, this was an example of exacerbating the problem before passing it on elsewhere.
Had the council performed any analysis on the benefits vs costs of the envelopes? Or had the council simply thought that the appearance of a pouch in which people could take their rubbish away with them was all they needed to do to give people a nice warm feeling that they were saving the planet? You decide.

Quote #1 is from Tim Newman

Desert Sun Blog

Unprincipled Agent Problem

Aug 21, 2019

Atticus says: Tim’s blogs are always a good read. He discusses contemporary issues in a very engaging and pithy manner. Here, Tim is discussing how corporations are happy to jump on SJW bandwagons if that’s what it takes to pacify the progressive loons:

To the extent a shift has occurred, it is that much of the left no longer see corporations as a problem but as a power to be harnessed in order to bring about their desired political goals, bypassing the political process that has thwarted their ambitions for so long.

What these CEOs are doing is signalling to the American left that they are open to doing their bidding provided they get left alone financially: we’ll sign up to Pride Month and let our HR department fire anyone who posts wrongthink on social media, just don’t look too closely at our lobbying efforts regarding NAFTA and our tax exemptions.

Quote #2 is from Eric Kaufman

UnHerd

Is Woke Culture Totalitarian?

Aug 20, 2019

Atticus says: We are all familiar with the ‘progessive’ zealots in western societies that are intent on smashing us all around the head with ‘cultural marxism’. I’ve always thought of these people as fascists (the irony being that these people style themselves as ‘anti-fascists’ thereby proving that they know nothing of history or they would slink away quietly).

In his new book, Legutko makes the comparison with communists. It’s a good comparison and it makes me want to read his book:

In The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, [Ryszard] Legutko points to the eerie similarity between 20th-century communist and contemporary liberal societies, providing western readers with an important new vantage point on problems of our current moment.

Having experienced the communist regime first-hand, he is well-placed to spot the symptoms of ideological tyranny today. Anything which stood in the way of the forward march of socialism was labelled by communists as ‘reactionary’, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘idealist’. Like today’s progressives, he says, they believed that familial, ethnic, national and religious traditions were obstacles to the revolution – atavisms to be overcome and ultimately dismantled.

Numerous artists and intellectuals jumped aboard the express, eagerly suppressing their rational faculties. Alongside the party apparatchiks, these ‘lumpen intellectuals’ constituted the shock troops of the socialist movement. Average citizens stepped into line to avoid harassment and intimidation.

Arguments no longer revolved around truth, but were judged by their fidelity to the tenets of the secular religion. You were either with the movement or against it – those who tried to straddle the middle ground were denounced by socialists as ‘bourgeois’. The dishonest ‘slippery slope’ charge was repeatedly laid by communists to indict moderate opponents seeking some form of compromise between competing positions. Those on the opposite side of the debate were deemed ‘dangerous’ rather than incorrect.

History, the socialists believed, was moving inexorably in the direction of ‘progress’, and the role of the vanguard was to vanquish those standing in its way. Sound familiar? Anyone exposed to the power of the cultural Left in today’s liberal institutions, where ‘because it’s 2019’ is a killer argument, will recognise this.

The 3rd quote this week is taken from Takimag

The Week That Perished

Aug 18th, 2019

Atticus says: I try to read every Takimag article. They have some great writers. Every Sunday they release their own take on the week’s most shameful stories. It’s like the Pepys diary except that instead of documenting the Great Fire of London, it’s documenting the decline of western civilisation. This extract shows the EU in full SJW mode:

…the European Union appears ready to pass a law mandating that all consumer goods made by Jews in occupied Palestinian territories be labeled as coming from “settlements” and “Israeli colonies.” Items made by Muslims in the same area will receive the more benign-sounding label of “Palestine.”

The law follows on the heels of a similar law in France, which, as it so happens, is being overrun with Muslims.

According to Yohan Benizri, a lawyer with an extremely Jewish-sounding name who represents a winery that would be affected by the new law, Jews are hypocritically being singled out for scorn:

“Can you imagine a situation where plastic cups imported from China must be labeled ‘this country has a one-child policy,’ or gas from Russia must be labeled, ‘This is gas from a country that illegally occupies Crimea,’ or products from the United States require the labeling ‘the U.S. engages in capital punishment and is building an illegal border wall?’ Product labels will have become political billboards depending on the whims of EU politicians, and every EU importer will shoulder a liability for not complying with arbitrary labeling laws.”

He has a point.

Quote #4 from Brendan O’Neill

Spiked-Online

Aug 21 2019

Who’s Really Demonising Journalists?

Atticus says: I’m a big fan of Brendan. Here he discusses the recent altercation that involved Owen Jones and hordes of highly trained far-right thugs who made some light scratches on Owen’s tummy before rushing off to buy 1st print editions of The Sun:

Why is the accusation of ‘hate preacher’ always made in one direction only – that is, towards the right-leaning press? Who, we might ask, is responsible for the violent assault on a 60-year-old feminist at a trans-sceptical event in Speakers’ Corner two years ago? Was it the virulently anti-‘TERF’ sections of the press, which includes Mr Jones himself, which frequently dehumanises certain feminists as bigots and haters? If the Mail is responsible for the violent assault of a left journalist, why aren’t left journalists responsible for the violent assault of a so-called TERF?

Or who is responsible for the attack on Andy Ngo in Portland? The so-called antifa forces who assaulted him, very violently, notably used milkshakes. They were clearly inspired by the middle-class milkshaking phenomenon in the UK and possibly by pro-milkshaking journalists at newspapers like the Guardian, one of whom said milkshaking is a valiant effort to ‘reduce men of pomp to figures of ridicule’. If the Express bears responsibility for right-wing violence, does the Guardian bear responsibility for left-wing violence?

We might also ask whether supposedly liberal media outlets have helped to stir up Islamist violence. We’re often told that right-wing newspapers embolden far-right terrorists. By the same token, might it be argued that the leftish media’s incessant, overblown claims about rampant Islamophobia fuel the violent victim mentality of people who carry out such atrocities as the Charlie Hebdo massacre or the Manchester Arena bombing? After all, that bomber was apparently convinced that Britain is a disgustingly Islamophobic society – where might he have got that idea from?

My flabber continues to be gasted by the extent of blatant hypocrisy endorsed by Leftists. So much so, that I realise the time has come to document as many examples as I can recollect. I will continue to update this list with appropriate examples over the coming weeks:

• Working Class: Liberal Leftists hate them. Particularly the white working class (WWC). The left took the votes of the WWC for granted while they went in pursuit of the brown vote. While their backs were turned, the WWC decided to vote for Brexit and the tories (& Trump) and the left loathe them for it. The left relied on WWC votes. Now they no longer bother to pretend they like the WWC.
• Materialism: Leftists are constantly complaining that Capitalist societies are obsessed with ‘stuff’. We buy too much stuff. We don’t need as much stuff. We should live simpler lives where we are not stripping the planet of its natural resources in order to feed our insatiable appetites for stuff. Yet, when it comes to Brexit, Leftists adopt the argument that is the exact opposite: there must not be any backsliding on standards of living caused by Brexit. No. When they are referring to the environment, then they preach that we must all live more simply. Yet, on the subject of Brexit they preach that living standards must continue to rise. “No one voted to be poorer”, say the Leftists. We must be able to buy more stuff. There can be no shortages of stuff. Lots of stuff must always be available from lots of different countries so we can choose exactly what stuff we buy. Leftists are aghast at the thought that Britons should focus on buying British stuff. No, they argue, Britons have a human right to be able to buy as much stuff from as many different countries as they have always been able to buy. What makes this hypocrisy ever more rancid is that British Leftists are more than happy to install the well known Socialist, Jeremy Corbyn, as their Prime Minister. Socialism has reduced the choice and quality of stuff available to its citizens in every country in which it has been tried. These people are not consistent and that makes them hypocrites.
• New Prime Ministers: Leftists are in uproar that Boris Johnson has become PM. It’s undemocratic, they say. Only 130,000 people voted for him after several rounds of voting by 340 Conservative MPs. But they weren’t complaining when Gordon Brown became PM without any voting at all: neither by MPs nor by Labour Party members. They don’t complain when Ursula von der Leyen becomes the new President of the European Commission when she was the only candidate put forward and even then only managed to win 52% of the votes of the EU Parliament. She was not elected by the EU electorate and she cannot be removed by the EU electorate. Martin Selmayr was promoted to Secretary General of the EU Commission without due process. All fine for your average Leftist.
• Protect the Planet: People in 1st world countries use much more energy and natural resources than people in 3rd world countries. Yet Leftists are happy to allow unlimited numbers of economic migrants to arrive in 1st world countries and none see that this policy clashes with their desire that the West must be doing everything it can to be carbon-neutral by next Tuesday.
• Corbyn: There is a big group of people who argue that Brexit must be overturned because of the negative effect it will have on the economy have no qualms about supporting Corbyn’s ambitions to be PM despite the negative effect his Premiership will have on the economy. The most charitable thing I can say about such people is that they suffer from cognitive dissonance.
• BAME: Leftists are all about protecting ethnic minorities. Leftists are always on the lookout for racism and, consequently, they see it everywhere. However, if ethnic minorities decide to shun the Left’s kind offer of protection in favour the tough love and self-determination offered by the Right, then things turn kind of nasty: the Leftists call them ‘race traitors’ or ‘tokens’. This is because, as far as the Leftists are concerned, ethnics shouldn’t have their own minds, like white people. They should vote as a block, like good ethnics.

Kehinde Edwards wrote the following in the Guardian:

By parading a set of token figures to legitimise his agenda, Johnson is treading a well-worn path

Some choice tweets from other race-baiters are here:

• Free Speech: Is there anything more hypocritical than liberals that want to curtail free speech? This is happening: academics and authors are denounced for having the wrong views. Books are banned. There is a strong movement to shut down criticism of Islam via Islamophobia legislation. The Big Tech companies throw people off their platforms for stating legal opinions. Google fired James Damore for exercising his right to free speech. This is enough to know these people are not liberals. They are totalitarians in liberal cloth.
• Brexit Coup: Leftist Remainers do not want to leave the EU with ‘no deal’. As such, the zeal of democracy burns so strongly within these people that they are planning to bring down the elected government in a carefully organised manoeuvre in order to install a caretaker government whose objective would be to stop the result of the 2016 referendum from being enacted. I’m not sure you could get any more democratic than that! It’s the very definition of ‘democracy’. Well, the 2019 definition at any rate.
• Tolerance: the Left preach tolerance. Yet, they are the most intolerant bunch of people you would never hope to meet. They are always on the lookout for words or deeds that are inconsistent with their ideology and then they go on the attack. They cancel people. They try to have people fired. They try to no-platform people. They try to suppress opinions they don’t agree with. These are not the actions of tolerant people! You don’t see the Right acting this way. The Right are much more about letting people express themselves. Live and let live. The Left are all about control.
• Feminism: Leftists are strong supporters of feminism and female rights. Leftists are also trying to tear down the patriarchy. All very militant. The Leftists are usually very vocal in support of womens rights. But not always. While Leftists will scream “sexism” and “misogynist” at any white man that fails to treat a white woman as the member of protected class, Leftists never attempt to win equal rights for Muslim women. However, they are prepared to scream very loudly for increasingly marginal gains for british women. Conversely, there are large gains that could be won for Muslim women yet lefties don’t go there. The necks of Lefties must be in constant pain with the effort of looking the other way so hard!
• Gays: Labour representatives regularly state that Tories are a threat to LGBT people. They have yet to produce any evidence of this. Yet they seek out association with groups that shamelessly declare their animosity to gays by executing them. I cannot understand the mental gymnastics required to not be aware of the inconsistancies here.
• Nationalism: Leftist complain about Trump’s decision to assassinate Iran’s Suleimani. They paint Suleimani as an honourable nationalist, looking after the interests of his country. Yet these people hate Westerners that put the interests of their countries before the interests of Globalism.
• Private Schooling: Labour’s 2019 GE manifesto declared they intended to abolish selective education. Fair enough. If you are the sort of person that believes all children should undeego the same education, irrespective of academic ability then abolishing selective education is the natural consequence. Except that virtually every member of Labour’s shadow cabinet that have children, chose selective education for their children. Yet another example of Leftists talking the talk but not walking the walk.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/791481/Labour-grammar-schools-Angela-Rayner-education-selective-Diane-Abbott-Shami-Chakrabarti

Diversity: all we here us ‘Diversity is our strength’. It is a mantra used endlessly by our liberal superiors to worm into our brains in order to facilitate liberals’ efforts to replace meritocracy as the oil that runs our corporations and institutions. To add muscle to the mantra, we see the emergence of ‘Diversity Tsars‘ and diversity quotas to ensure that women and ethnic minorities will land jobs that they may not have landed if the choices had been left merely to qualifications, ambition, dedication, aptitude, hard-work, conscientiousness and lateral-thinking. There are increasing numbers of ‘Diversity Officers’ at universities whose job is to root out ‘DiversityCrime’. However, where there is a leftist cause, hypocrisy is never far behind. The left are not interested in diversity of opinion. Au contraire, Leftists are hounding people who step out of line from the liberal idealogy that must be voiced in public.

Redemption: Leftists are passionate advocates for the power of redemption. People can be forgiven. People can turn their lives around. A criminal who has served his time must be welcomed back into society. These are noble sentiments. Unfortunately, Leftists are just so damned hypocritical when it comes to enforcement of these values. We see this every time a right wing person is found to have sent a tweet that falls short of this week’s rules on political correctness. In such a case, an apology is never enough for Leftists. Leftists will not stop until such a person has lost their job and their reputation. And they will repeat the nature of the crime whenever necessary. There is no redemption for the crass tweet you sent 10 years ago. But the rapist gets a second chance? It seems….inconsistent?

Lockdown #1: leftists have been the biggest supporters of lockdown. Lockdown has provided leftists with ample opportunities to pursue one of their favourite pastimes: virtue-signalling. Hence, they have seized the opportunity to call for putting lives before profits and they have taken the approach that each and every Covid19 death is the responsibility of the government. Also, leftists feel it is manifestly unfair that doctors and nurses should be exposed to illnesses carried by covid patients. Therefore, we should die in our homes, rather than in hospitals. It almost goes without saying that leftists don’t really like working anyway – as I have written before – so the idea of being paid by the government to stay at home every day is like all their dreams coming true at once. In short, Leftists have been passionate advocates for keeping lockdown in place until there are no longer any cases of Covid 19. All of this has been fertile ground for classic leftist hypocrisy: Right wingers suspected of breaking lockdown rules have been hunted down with puritanical zeal. Yet rule breaking by Leftists has been ignored by the leftist media and leftist politicians: Rosie Duffield; Stephen Kinnock; Ian Blackford; Alistair Campbell – these stories were reported but no media pile on ensued in the manner that it did for Dominic Cummings despite the fact that Cummings ‘transgression’ was the most minor of all of them.

Lockdown #2: As discussed above, Leftists have been rabid supporters of lockdown. Or they were until a better political agenda arose: Black Lives Matter. In the aftermath of the police killing of a George Floyd in USA, BLM protests were arranged in London. Yet not a single Leftist politician criticised these mass events. I wonder why?

From Brandon O’Neil in The Spectator:

The double standard was made crystal clear by Labour MP Dawn Butler. When in mid-May Boris Johnson relaxed the lockdown rules and said some people could return to work, Ms Butler fumed. She said the PM was being ‘reckless’ and, get this, was ‘sending people out to catch the virus’. And yet when Conservative MP Kevin Hollinrake criticised the BLM demo on the basis that it could cause a second spike, Butler responded: ‘Don’t you dare! Don’t even go there!’

Uighur Muslims: China’s treatment of the 1m Uighur Muslims that reside in China appears to be not dissimilar to Germany’s treatment of Jews under Hitler: they have been rounded up and sent to concentration camps. There are stories that women Uighurs are being forcibly sterilised. Yet the Left say nothing. It doesn’t suit their agenda. In the West, the Left patrol for microaggressions against Muslims yet they will ignore genuine aggressions occurring in the East. How can that be? I suspect it has something to do with China being a Left wing state. Leftists don’t mind totalitarian governments as long as they are Left Wing. China serves as the role model for what Leftists would like Western Countries to become.

I will add more examples to this list as and when they occur. It won’t take long!