Showing posts with label Marx. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marx. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Why the chicken crossed the road

As explained by...

The Bible
And God came down from the heavens, and He said unto the chicken, "Thou shalt cross the road." And the chicken crossed the road, and there was much rejoicing.

Jesse Jackson
The road, you will see, represents the black man. The chicken crossed the "black man" in order to trample him and keep him down.

Baltimore Police Department
Give us five minutes with the chicken and we'll find out.

Richard Nixon
The chicken did not cross the road. I repeat, the chicken did not cross the road. I don't know any chickens. I have never known any chickens.

Ernest Hemingway
To die in the rain.

Martin Luther King Jr.
I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross roads without having their motives called into question.

Grandpa Simpson
In my day, we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone told us that the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.

Aristotle
It is the nature of chickens to cross roads.

Karl Marx
It was an historical inevitability.

Bashir Assad
This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were quite justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.

Ronald Reagan
What chicken?

Machiavelli
The point is that the chicken crossed the road. Who cares why? The end result of crossing the road justifies whatever motive there was.

Sigmund Freud
The fact that you are at all concerned that the chicken crossed the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity.

Bill Gates
I am about to release Chicken Coop 10, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your checkbook. And Explorer is an inextricable part of the operating system.

Albert Einstein
Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?

Bill Clinton
I did not cross the road with that chicken. However, I did ask Vernon Jordan to find the chicken a job in New York.

Walt
Because the chicken lacks any reasoning or decision-making capabilities, it seems unlikely that the chicken's action was spurred by any particular motivation.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

"I didn't see this coming!": Marx

On July 18th, I wrote about "The new oppressed minority", and introduced to you the British neologism "chavs", standing (possibly) for "Council Housed And Violent". I was looking for an example and came up with just one picture. Since this weekend, though, you've been able to see hundreds of pictures and videos of chavs in action, in the riots that have spread from a largely black area of London to several English cities.

Who are the chavs -- the hooded hooligans we see burning, looting and pillaging their own neighbourhoods? Where do they come from? Why are they doing this? In "More about chavs", I tried to show how Britain's welfare statism -- relentless even during the government of Margaret Thatcher -- has produced a large and growing underclass of uneducated, unemployed and generally useless young people, parasites sucking on the tits of the British taxpayers. It is that scummy underclass -- on this side of the water we would call them "white trash" -- who are revolting. And no, I'm not making a cheap joke.

Karl Marx saw class warfare as inevitable. He predicted a revolution of the proletariat -- meaning workers and peasants -- who would rise against the upper classes, the landlords, capitalists and gentry who (he claimed) held the lower classes in poverty and servitude.

Marx had the general idea, but he never imagined that the upper classes would create and nurture the drunken mob which roams the streets of British cities even as I write.

For the hoodlums you see kicking in windows and robbing the wounded are not workers, peasants or students. They are NEETs -- another new word for you -- Not in Employment, Education or Training. In other words, they are idlers and layabouts, who would be starving and homeless but for the largesse of the nanny state which provides them with public housing ("council houses"), free healthcare, and "allowances" for being unemployed or unemployable.

Marx would doubtless approve of all these socialistic -- OK, communist! -- programmes. However, it was the British electorate which voted for one government after another -- not excepting that of Margaret Thatcher -- which instituted these "measures for the assistance of the less fortunate and disadvantaged". "Progressive" thinking, "progressive" thinkers and "progressive" politicians have sowed the wind. And now Britain reaps the whirlwind.

But before we say it can't happen in America, let us remember the so-called race riots of the `60s and `70s: Detroit, Harlem, and of course Watts. While there were racial overtones to those riots, they were just as much about class as about race. In the USA, "progressive" civil rights, welfare and criminal justice policies have spawned a huge underclass which just happens to be comprised largely of brown and black people. Those are the ones who take to the streets and steal TVs to get even for "police brutality" and other real or imaginary injustices.

Marx, it seems, was colour-blind. Perhaps it was because most of the citizens of his native Prussia and of Britain, where he did most of his thinking and writing, were white. The UK had not yet been inundated by wave after wave of South Asian, Caribbean and African immigrants.

And in the 19th century, when Marx wrote, Britain had not yet tried putting his theories into practice. It's a pity Marx didn't live to see how his vision of Utopia played out. What happened to the Great Britain of the Victorian era? "Progressive" policies turned it into the mongrelized anti-society that is collapsing tonight.