Dear unionized univesity faculty couple with a combined income over 200 thousand dollars a year who wrote the editorial in the Coast
arguing NS should “de-grow” the economy and that NSians should “embrace” (economic) “backwardness,” and live some kind of Grapes of Wrath
style, hard-scrabble, hand-to-mouth, subsistence “bare bones” living by “making ends meet” “cobbling together ad-hoc jobs” “in harmony with the seasons”
and that the model for Nova Scotia should be early 1900’s agrarian peasants: your article reminds me of Jonathan Swift’s “A modest proposal,” except that
he was satire and you guys are completely serious. Universities really have become bastions of EXTREME left wing and environmentalist reactionaries, haven’t they? —Bizznatch
This article appears in Sep 11-17, 2014.
This behavior actually strikes me as rather extreme right-wing ideology, OB. Why do you think they are left-wing?
Anybody in a comfortable and secure job, at or near the top (especially if that job holds power or title), who makes a 6-figure salary while saying ‘the rest of us’ should be happy with poverty and embrace a system of financial inequality does not sound like a leftist. Leftists are all about power to the people – that’s why they are criticized by people on the right for supporting things like social programs, unions, the environment, etc.
ersatz left wingers. any ideology has the ‘except moi’ turds at the top.
anyway, we have enough subsistence people with bad teeth who scrabble around with their atv’s and tie up dogs.
They actually sound like a bizarre amalgam of Lazar Kaganovich, the Bolshevik apparatchik who drove Stalin’s genocidal collectivization of agriculture, Saloth Sar, a young Cambodian student in Paris who advanced the theory that urban life needed to be eliminated in order to create a more perfect world, and Henry Morgenthau, the Roosevelt New Dealer whose plan to de-industralize Germany after the Nazi defeat, probably added 2 years to World War 2.
But it’s just academic theory right? No chance it could ever happen?
These two clowns sound remarkably like the middle class spoilt brats who spent the mid 80’s setting off bombs in BC and attacking a Litton Plant in Ontario
The difference between a leftish academic and a right-wing anti-gubbmint survivalist?
The latter has better firearms, and, he actually knows how to use them.
It should be pointed out in the interest of political balance that Heinrich Himmler was also a big believer in the Nazi version of new agey Blut und Boden bull shit. The so-called nobility of the peasantry – attractive to anyone who has never spent a lifetime plowing rocks and burying 3 quarters of your children before they reach the age of 6.
If someone wants to live a minimalist lifestyle, practicing self-sufficiency – Hay, more power to you. Want to live on a collective – go to Israel and join a kibbutz. I’ve heard the experience has cured more than one young ideologue of the virus of socialism.
uh, hang on just a minute. what a piss-poor job OP made of quoting the article. or rather, what a great job of twisting the POV.
(granted these people look like self congratulatory idiots (as do most of the coast contributors) but their ideas are OK. no one said we should wear sackcloth and grub around in the fields.
no fracking was the impetus for the article. and just because someone has a job doesn’t negate the suggestions. job sharing. job creativity. more gardens. buying from and supporting local businesses. yes to all that.
And fracking, BDM… add fracking to the list. I’ll buy local frack gas…
Hols, it is exactly the way left wing extremists sounds. Do you think Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their ilk all over the world lived liked their downtrodden, poor comrades. If these so-called professors were serious they would volunteer to take a huge pay cut but that’ll never happen.
AN INCOHERENT BITCH
“… your article reminds me of Jonathan Swift’s “A modest proposal,” except that he (sic) was satire and you guys are completely serious. Universities really have become bastions of EXTREME left wing and environmental reactionaries, haven’t they?” Bizznach
Swift’s semi-satirical “A Modest Proposal” was for the Irish who were then undergoing famine conditions, to eat their own children. How does this remind you of the claim that universities having become extreme left wing and environmental reactionaries? What are you talking about?
Further, how CAN the universities be, on the one hand, “extreme left wing” which simply means ideologically supporting the working classes against those whom they regarded as their capitalist exploiters and, on the other, be “environmental reactionaries” which, if anything at all, means those climate change deniers who exploit the resources of the environment purely for monetary gain without reference to the conservation of the resident flora and fauna? In other words, what do you understand by the concepts “extreme left wing” and “environmental reactionaries?” What are you talking about?
I get the sense – I don’t get The Coast – that you have torn your quotations out of context to serve your own muddled purposes. Now THAT is what it means to be incoherent.
A pleasure as always.
Cheerio!
So when do we vacate the urban core and start shooting the doctors and others of education and put the leftovers out to plow the rocks? I’ve got a few guns if anyone needs to borrow one. This is the Year 0 for Nova Scotia!
Ok guys – but you can have MODERN left-leaning views and not be a Marxist/Stalinist/Maoist Hitler. I mean seriously, do you think Harper, Bush, Obama, Cameron, and their ilk all over the world live liked the downtrodden, counterparts; members of a shrinking middle class and victims of a struggling economy and heavy-handed police state? Of course not. So what makes them any different than these communist leaders you name?
I didn’t read the article so I don’t know what kind of bias spin OB is attempting to put on the actual events or content of the article but their description SOUDNS more to me like the professors have an almost elitist oligarchical point of view, something akin to Ayn Rand or the tea-baggers. It doesn’t represent the viewpoint of someone who considers themself “Left”.
How can you be pro-union, pro workers-right, pro-social prgrams and advocate a corporate elite caste at the same time? It doesn’t work. Communist dictatorships are not an accurate portrayal of what it means to be “Left” in the present place and time, and I think you know that.
hoist, absolutely NOT ayn rand-ish. op’s rant takes a couple of phrases used in the articles and wings around like a cheap fuck doll with the ass blown out.
Struck me as very Ayn Randish . The idea’s that OB puts forth on behalf of these professors (not the article). I should really read the article to see for myself what kind of butcher job OB did with their quotes…eh, maybe later.
this bitch just gets more left field. salaries are published you know. op, it only leads to a mistrust of your whole rant when you get the basics wrong. by about half.
Speaking as one whose Mannichean view of left-right politics was formed in the 80’s and is very comfortable with an Us vs. Them mindset, I can make this generalization.
Left Wingers believe that the Right are forever trying to take way their rights; Right Wingers believe the Left are too pussy to ever defend ours.
The two spackers who wrote the original article seem to exemplify the Puritanical aspect of the Radical Left. We as society “need” to be brought down to a lower level for our collective crimes against…? Humanity, The Earth, Marx? Whatever. We are all guilty and require both punishment AND redemption at one fell swoop. Carefully guided, of course, by a nomenklatura of those with wisdom and vision, like…The Authors?
Trust me, I’m long past believing in the myth of trickle down economics. And despite having spent the last 2 decades watching “my” guys wage incessant war upon “my” class, I’m still not about to drink the lefty Koolaid and let the socialists pick my pocket for for the sake of the slackers, wasters and scum of society.
The Messianic impulse always sets off alarm bells. God or Gaia? Collectivism or Excellence? Rand or Chomsky? Makes no difference. When people exhort the public about the need for unity they mean “Line up behind me” When they call for greater sacrifice – they mean “You” And maybe the Left have learned to pronounce the names of Stalin and Mao with the appropriate distaste deserved of those who attempted to build a utopian society on the skulls of 100 million, but they still seem rather over-comfortable with the notion of being “Engineers of Human Souls” to which I say “Go Fuck Yourself!” The Right may try to limit my behavior by limiting my options; but the Left have never stopped trying to control how people think. And perhaps I have my priorities wrong, but I know which option I distrust more.
I just want to give a big shout out to the OP and all the contributors to this thread for provoking an interesting discussion and exchange of views . Everybody has brought their A-Game to this one. This is LTWWB at it’s best
has anyone actually read the original article (excepting OP who obviously looks at the world through his WW2 censor glasses – seeing every 5th word) ?
the couple were responding to a backlash from the so-called ‘elite’ on the province’s ban on fracking. they were defending the decision to forgo it’s dubious benefits and responding to accusations that nova scotians were backwards idiots. they did not appear to be exhorting anyone to do anything, but instead offered up various ways in which nova scotia had already moved PAST the old fashioned resource management (fish/coal) style that could only function if we had somewhere else to go. the old agrarian cooperative was mentioned as an example of something that works in small communities for some people. also jobs that change with the seasons. fish in season, then farm in season, or cut wood, or run a tourist thingie, or fix motorcycles. instead of a pell-mell rush to emulate fucking Toronto lifestyle or anything the American entertainment networks tell us we should strive for. condo living! the latest fashions! office job with corner windows! bmw! vacations at some cookie cutter resort! starbucks cup attached to each hand! designer dog! and the latest electronics (upgrade quarterly or be considered a dolt)
this constant shoving from people who want to take my money and squish ME into a little box they have designed smacks of totalitarianism. it is not free market, it hasn’t been for 100 years. it’s a gang of rich thugs trying to herd us all into a milking stall.
THAT MANICHEAN VIEW
The “Manichean Heresy” of biblical times consisted of the view that the Devil (Evil) was an actual presence in the world like the Christian God (the Good), in effect maintaining that
the Devil was not simply an absence of the Good as Christian orthodoxy at the time maintained, and so must be rooted out. With the decline of the theological world-view and the rise of secularism the role of God and the Devil may have had their time on the world’s stage but not the Manichean view that supported them. It’s just that their names have changed but the mindset has not.
To say that the “Left Wingers” believe that the “Right” (note the absence of the term “Wingers”) are forever trying to take away their rights is to phrase the debate in Rightist terms. Left Wingers don’t talk in terms of their “rights” but rather in terms of the “Brotherhood of Man.” For the Rightist, of course, this is little more than a ruse, a ploy to impose their ruthless dictatorial Stalinist regime but that’s like a Left Winger saying that the Rightist emphasis on their rights (read “property rights”) is just a ploy to enshrine their views in a ruthless, dictatorial Hitlerite regime. When the Rightists talk about “defending their rights” they mean defending the perpetuation of a plutocratic oligarchy in which, by virtue of their intelligence and hard work, they happen to enjoy positions of appropriate and unassailable pre-eminence.
Of course, at their extremes both embody that messianic impulse which issues out into dictatorship whether of the Right (property, class, race) or of the Left (the Party apparatchiks). Both seek to bring that Gnostic dream of a heaven on earth to fruition. Both are ideologically driven. But this is the problem. Truly, man does not live by bread alone. He is the embodiment of his ideas. The problem arises when those ideas slide off into the realm of ideology.
To say that the Left “has never stopped trying to control how people think” is once again to define the debate in Rightist terms. The Right, under the guise of a rhetoric of “individual liberty” – well, liberty for some, anyway – equally tries to control how people think. In a sense they are both right since it is only at the level of how people think that social justice and, yes, meaningful individual liberty, will prevail. Only when the Right and the Left stop caricaturing each other will the frail seedling of peace begin to bloom.
A pleasure as always.
Cheerio!
Meh – Fuck ’em. Fuck their kale patch. Fuck their home brewed mead. Fuck their Esperanto couples evenings. Fuck their folk art. Fuck their bicycles. Fuck her fair trade Moroccan henna. Fuck his Rimpoche-cum beard wax. Fuck them and their whole “Be Happy with Less” philosophy.
Fuck them.
Oh dear.
Montrealman – the day I find the fragile seedling of peace blooming in my garden I’ll rip it out and stomp it down.
More room for kale.
The whole fracking debate has turned into some sort of holy war and things have been blown way out of proportion by both sides. The reality lies somewhere in between – neither saviour nor destroyer. To be honest, if I were dependent on a well for water I’d be more concerned about what my neighbours had going on. Leaking oil tanks, septic fields, people spraying pesticides on their lawns and gardens, backyard mechanics changing oil, etc, etc. Anyway, it’s really hard to find balanced, well informed opinion on the fracking issue but this one is not bad: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/opinion/…
Oh Ivan, you don’t hate ‘Leftists’ – you hate hipsters and young people. You’re thinking of hipsters and young people. 🙂
you hipsters! don’t come in here with your hairy faces, with your vegan diets and your tiny feet and sawdust bedding, you dirty hipster!
oh wait. HAMSTERS!
Naw Hoist – I hate everybody. I have seen the enemy, and he is me.
He he – I started feeding squirrels in the gulag parking lot this summer. They’ve now invaded the warehouse. Attack my evil minions. Spread your squirrelly ebola.
RSVP
: Ivan “The Equalizer” Sonofabitch (10:11AM)
Oh dear.
A pleasure as always.
Cheerio!
Way to reading comprehension, OB. You successfully misinterpreted every single one of your quoted catchphrases and took them completely out of context. It’s dumb like yours that makes us look like toothless rednecks.
ivan I sent you an invite to the Halifax veg festival. they are featuring KALE.
I’ll be there, stag, with bells and antlers on. Lock up your daughters!
Oh dear.
In response to Ivan Sonofabitch’s epic series of rants on this topic (see 09/18/2014 at 9:43 AM for my favourite), I hereby nominate him for the purely honorary post of Mayor of Bitchville.
uncle vanya has many awards *squeee*
Ivan is already the colonel of Bitchville, which is a post I am sure he would relish far more than the bureaucratic title of Mayor. Other titles he may enjoy: Sith Lord, Dear Leader, High Emperor or Supreme Commander. 😉
Retired, Gentlemen. Retired. Although I’ve awarded myself more spurious titles and decorations than the average African President-For-Life, I still prefer to think of myself as the lonely Squire of Gothos. >: )
Thanks Beans, for the compliment. I had fun with that one @ 9:43.
Hoist, you know me well, Bru. Perhaps too well. >; )
Painey – your hugs are always most appreciated. Better than kale and not nearly so damaging to my glucose levels as Barstux Milkshakes.
Yeah all the corporate fat cats and powers that be, government officials and politians all want back to basics butter-churners in bonets who will work for buttons while they receive cushy salaries and sit on their fat wallets doing sweet fuck all!