Liberty... REVOKED (632 hits)
Category: PoliticsRating: 1.4 on 11 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Iago <staccers.at.hotmail.com> (View user info) at 2004-11-19 14:20:29 EST
"And I tell you this, gentlemen," I said, and 100 Uberii in black tie boggled drunkenly and hung on my words... "You know what this Labour Government wants to ban?" I yipped.
"What!?" They chorused, red-faced with anticipatory wrath.
"They want to stop you smoking!" I said. "No more smoking in the workplace, or pubs, or restaurants; no more pint n' Castella in the 19th hole, and in so far as the putting green is probably a public place, you will be forbidden even from having a crafty fag as you steady your nerves!"
"Outrageous!" They said, and for a while a surf of indignation thundered around me, until a man just to my right piped up in level tones: "Well, you know, I am all in favour of a ban, actually."
"What!?" I said, Amazed, but before I could get to the bottom of this dissent, two or three others around the room were putting their hands up and demanding a ban on any kind of smoking in public. "But hang on," I said, and I explained the statistics about passive smoking: that you only have to charcoal grill frankfurters for half an hour on your Barbie, and you will inhale the same quantities of carcinogens as you could expect to absorb in a week of passive smoking.
"Yes, yes," said my dear friends at Uber, "we all know that, but the honest truth", they said, is that they used to be smokers themselves, and that it was a filthy habit, and they thought that the new law would help them resist any temptation to take it up again.
"What!?" I said, still incredulous. "Next thing," I said, "you'll be wanting to ban drink in order to remove any temptation to get drunk, ban cars to avoid ever being tempted to drive too fast..." But then I thought more about their position, and I could see a kind of attraction in it. Of course it is ignoble to invoke the nanny state in order to correct your own personal weakness, but at least my friends' motives were somehow honest, and based on intimate knowledge of the people they knew best - themselves.
My black-tied chums weren't actuated by a desire to impose some superior code of behaviour on others; their motivation was entirely selfish, and I can live with their selfishness.
It's the do-gooders I can't stand, and this Labour Government is riddled by people who long to stop other people doing things of which they disapprove. In so far as there may or may not be a case for banning smoking in public, it should be no business of central government - or at least not while smoking is legal.
It should be up to the individual pubs, clubs and restaurants to decide weather their clientele want a fag or not; and if the emanations of the state must become involved at all, then we have innumerable tiers of parish, borough, district or county councils that could take a decision reflecting the views of local people.
As it is, the interdiction is to be imposed centrally, because the Labour Party has a drug of its own. It's called interference, and there is nothing that gives the present lot a bigger kick than locating what they believe is an imperfection in human nature and stamping it out. That is why they want to ban hunting.
It is nothing to do with animal welfare; it is because they behold the joy on the mud-spattered faces of the hunters; just as they observe the blissful satisfaction of someone filling his lungs with smoke, and they are overwhelmed with disapproval.
It's not the fact that killing foxes appeals to the Labour Party; it is the mental state of those who do it, the "enjoyment of cruelty," as they put it. They make windows into men's souls, dislike what they see, and resolve to change it, and they take no heed of the consequences of their ill-thought-out bans.
How is it supposed to work, if the hunts go over to drag-hunting, and then start finding, lo and behold, that the hounds start hunting live foxes? The police will want to show that they have been breaking the law, but how will they prove that a fox was involved? They will assuredly have to catch the fox, and produce it in evidence. And how will they catch the fox?
Why, with dogs, of course.
The whole thing is mad, and a waste of police time. There will be a mutiny in the countryside, lawlessness, and bloodshed, and all because the modern Labour Party believes in the perfectibility of man; whereas the true conservative knows that do-goodery is often far more dangerous than masterly inactivity.
If you want evidence of this truth on a global scale, look at the war in Iraq, which I supported, but which has proved a grim lesson in the hazards of imposing ones own world-view on others.
We went in to Iraq - so we are told now - not because of the threat of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, but because it was in the interests of the people in Iraq.
We didn't do it for ourselves
- oh no, we weren't being selfish
- we did it FOR THEM. And that was the argument I swallowed myself, and I must now admit, in all my intellectual candour, that it looks pretty thin.
If we knew what we know now, that the removal of Saddam
- on behalf of the people of Iraq
- would mean killing upwards of 14,000 of those very same people and starting a vicious insurgency in the Sunni triangle, would we do it again?
We should have the common sense to listen to others before we presume to act in their interests: we should listen to the landlords who would like to keep tolerating a perfectly legal activity; we should listen to the countyside; and we should not have decided, from a position of such ignorance, that the best way to help Iraq was to kill so many of his people.
And for people who don't know, Boris Johnson is your daddy.
User Reviews
Submitted by redskieslookfake (user info) at 2006-05-16 09:33:11 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWIUp19bBoA
Submitted by The_Cyst_Master (user info) at 2006-03-10 13:13:10 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
WINNER! http://www.ubersite.com/m/84913
Submitted by SAECULUM.AUREUM (user info) at 2004-11-30 13:50:43 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by AsshOly (user info) at 2004-11-28 05:36:55 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
My hip really hurts and this +2 is because of stabkill. I didnt read the post.
Submitted by Bizdorph (user info) at 2004-11-28 05:29:27 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
"...you will be forbidden even from having a crafty fag as you steady your nerves!"
God. The combination of the English "fag" for cigarette and the word "crafty" is just a lethal combination.
+2.
Submitted by Stabkill (user info) at 2004-11-28 05:16:11 EST (#)
Ranking: -2
Lying sack of shit stealing material bastard.
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2004-11-19 17:48:57 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
foxxor hunting roxxorz!
Submitted by hidden101 (user info) at 2004-11-19 16:33:08 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
fuckin' a.
Submitted by Stin (user info) at 2004-11-19 14:34:41 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
"We should have the common sense to listen to others before we presume to act in their interests"
Submitted by mikethescottish (user info) at 2004-11-19 14:33:45 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Strange how people are less concerned about the government banning things when they'll benefit in some small way. My liver's going to give up long before my lungs, anyway.
Submitted by Iago (user info) at 2004-11-19 14:26:41 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
'his people'....? WHOOPS.. i mean 'its people.'