Neil’s been at it again. He really, really doesn’t get it. Sometimes, trying to communicate with someone who uses reverse logic gives me a headache.
It is fair to say I came in for a little criticism (here, here, here and here) for writing this post and in particular these comments.
Well, quite. Why is that? Because you have been talking utter bollocks is why.
The rest is mostly insults accusing me of being dim, lazy, a fascist etc. etc.
That’s because you are lazy, you do ignore history, you do not use logic. And if you really do believe the codswallop you write, you are dim.
I’m afraid this comment is for me the final straw:
You are voluntarily agreeing to being tracked, so therefore how can you argue against tracking? If it is ok for you to ‘volunteer’ to be tracked (along with most of the population) then there can’t be anything wrong in principle with being tracked. To say otherwise is hypocritical, whether it is compulsory or not is irrelevant to this point.
For fuck’s sake! I’ve lost count of the times people have pointed out to you just why the difference is significant. If I was alone making an argument this utterly stupid and people banged on and on about why I was wrong, I might just start to doubt myself. But, then, when my opinion is confronted by facts, I reassess my opinion, it’s what any reasonable person would do. People who think as you do are part of my decision to cut my ties with the Labour party.
Rather than stay within the only decent(ish) party that has a chance of being elected and try and improve it. It doesn’t sound very decent to me, it sounds like a cop out.
The Labour party is not a decent(ish) party. While it continues to indulge in the most arrant control freakery and while it treats the rule of law with contempt it is without doubt a contemptible party. When faced with this, leaving was the honourable thing to do. It is not a cop out. A cop out is remaining while being sickened by what the party now represents. I refuse to belong to such a party. I refuse absolutely to be associated with something that so horrifies my sense of ethics. Leaving was the honest thing to do. Do not accuse me of copping out; you lack the intellectual honesty to qualify to make such a comment.
Yes, I’m angry. So, yes, I’ve followed Tom Paine’s advice. I feel marginally better for it.
Update:
Having recovered from my cluster headache, I took another look sans irritability. Neil’s latest proclamation for those of us who value our privacy:
A minor inconvenience to those who value their privacy could bring huge reductions in crime and huge increases in detection rates. So yes you are potentially injuring my health and wellbeing.
What a pile of fucking ignorant horseshit. And that, frankly, is being generous. If you are thinking of voting Labour at the next election, this is the kind of illiberal fuckwittery you will be voting for. This is the thinking which concluded that the Gestapo was doing a damn fine job of cleaning up the streets of Berlin and Warsaw, this is the mentality that queued up for jobs guarding the local labour camp. This is the very same mindset that gave us the Stazi and spied on friends, colleagues, family and neighbours because their privacy was potentially injurious to the wellbeing of the good little soldiers of the state. Ignorant, stupid and fucking dangerous.
Read it and weep.
Neil is essentially the gold standard of idiocy in the British blogosphere, against whom all other idiots are measured and found wanting. He is indeed the nonpareil of dimness, the supreme example of clueless fuckwittery, a poltroon of the first water, an unthinking cheerleader for every piece of illiberal nonsense that issues from the government.
No matter how corrupt New Labour are, no matter what lies they tell, no matter how far they push, pry, poke and intrude into the everyday lives of each one of us, he stands there cheering because they are _his_ team. If his team are for it, it must be good. No need for thought – it is the source of the policy, not its content, that determines whether it should be supported or not. A useful idiot indeed.
And all he can muster in defence is a mindless repetition, like some sort of horrid re-run of a Ben Elton performance from the 1980s, “Yeah, but Thatcher…” – half mantra, half protective spell.
Although many years ago a colleague of mine accused me of not suffering fools gladly, I can be pretty placid. The remark that really pipped me was the one about “copping out”. The idiot Bob Piper made a similarly asinine remark a year or so ago. Like his fellow New Labour loons, Piper and Kelly, Harding is indeed of the “my tribe no matter what” mentality.
I cannot be loyal to a party that is inconsistent and hypocritical. I opposed identity cards when the Tories proposed it. That Labour now want to do the same thing, my continued opposition is not hypocrisy, it is consistency. I cannot and will not be a part of something I have come to despise. My decision to leave was an ethical one and I’ll be damned if I will stand back and be accused of “copping out” by someone who displays a staggering degree of ignorance of history, humanity and his own damned party’s switcheroo.
At the end of the day Longrider, you and people like you are going to give us a Cameron Tory Government. We will see what you think then. Whinge, whinge, whinge, you will never change anything by copping out of making positive decisions and you most definitely have done that.
And another thing, if you think I am a cheerleader for this government and have a ‘my team’ mentality you clearly have not read much of my blog. Maybe you just choose to misunderstand the issues but it was the Nazis who gave technology a bad name not the technology that made the Nazis bad. Until you (and your few thousand petitioner friends) understand that point you will continue to live in your imaginary worlds, but the vast majority of people want to see their lives improved not some distorted principles kept that make little difference to anything.
You really are a fuckwit of the first order, aren’t you? I don’t know how you manage it. Just for once, there is a glimmer of hope – you are quite right; it’s what we have been saying all along; your fucking party is the problem, not the technology. Many thanks for getting the point… finally.
It is not I who misunderstands and it is not I who is living in an imaginary world. It is not I nor my few thousand petitioner friends who are out of step, it is you.
Leaving Labour was one of the most positively ethical decisions I’ve made – I repeat as you have so much difficulty understanding plain English, I did not cop out, I made a positive decision to leave a party that was so thoroughly corrupt and malignant, that I refuse to be associated with it. That is most certainly a positive decision. Remaining would have been moral cowardice.
I don’t particularly want a Cameron government, I certainly don’t want another Labour one and will do everything in my power to lose them votes. The lesser of two evils, I suspect. None of the big three represent what I want to see in a government because none of them represents a truly liberal democracy. However, if a Cameron government keeps its promise to repeal the identity cards act, then for that alone, it will be worthwhile.
Oi Neil! “the vast majority of people want to see their lives improved” – that includes me. We just don’t agree on how to do it. I want the government and PC Plod to try hard to stop baddies so they don’t mug, burgle, get paid for giving honours etc., – your solution is to keep an eye on me and prevent me from having anything which is personal and private by making me the property of the State because you don’t trust me with my private life. You also presumably go along with the idea that making more and more laws, rather than trying to enforce a few more, will stop the bad guys? It’s a curious but basic difference of approach in which you assume no-one can be trusted at all, and in which I prefer to trust people until they show they are up to no good.