Greenery
Okay, so it happened. After all that anticipation, we finally got the budget we all expected; a shit one, frankly. Nobody expected it to be anything other than fascistic, nobody can be in the least bit surprised that it's grotesque in the way it victimises people who've got fuck-all money to give. Suffice it to say that a family with a single minimum-wage income, an eight year-old mortgage and two children of preschool age will actually lose more from their weekly pay than a single person earning €50k per annum. We were told it was going to be a tough budget, but people also threw the word "fair" around with gay abandon. Fair? Add the levies and taxes, and the tax rate for incomes over €175k is 48%, exactly the same as people who earned about 40 grand back in 1997; meanwhile, 7% of people's income is taxed from zero upwards... fair?
In fact, the only surprising thing about the Bludget is just how little they seem to care about how the masses will react; it's as if Fianna Fáil don't really want to be re-elected, and have already started making plans to become panel-beaters in their spare time... but we didn't really expect it to be anything but evil, not really. Think of the big faeces in Government - sorry, I mean the big faces in government; people like Cowen, Harney, Lenihan are all uniquely distinguishable by being as physically ugly as they are ugly on the inside, and you can't help but think of them floating like fried eggs in their own congealed crapulence, burping as they slither to the kitchen like contintental drift, spending their spare time drinking the tears of small children, and thinking up new ways to tax homeless people and buy worthless land in Dubai with the revenue.
And then there's the Green Party. And here, of course, things become different. Everyone hates Fianna Fáil, obviously, but it's a passive hatred; hating Fianna Fáil is as pointless as hating fog, or sprouts, or Daleks. The Greens are a different matter.
I can't stand things that don't do what they're designed to do. The Green Party have always been seen as harmless and lovable eccentrics, the sort of people who will go and plant oregano in the window-boxes of their Dáil offices, the type of party who are quite interested in the notion of social justice and equality but not quite as excited by that as they are by the concept of compost. They have carefully portrayed themselves as Pretty Decent Lads, and if they have to take a few Minister for Parsnips jokes from Pat Rabbitte, then so be it. The Greens play a delicate game, where they are in government, but at the same time try not to be accountable for anything that bad oul' Fianna Fáil does. They keep their head down, look after their ministerial portfolios, and pat themselves on the back when they give the workers of Ireland a tax-deductible bike or two.
At this point, I could expand on the weakness of this attitude; I could point out that viewing every problem through the same distorting prism is obviously limiting, for example. I speak as someone who, objectively, has a certain sympathy with "the Green agenda", although the crucial difference is that I don't see it as an "agenda" at all. The dwindling of natural resources and the murderous prospect of climate change aren't political slants, they're objective facts; reacting this isn't an agenda, it's an essential response to the reality that millions upon millions of people have already been condemned to death, and more will follow. In other words, being "Green", as it's called, is just pragmatic planning.
However, the Green Party just don't see it that way. These are people who still see being Green as a lifestyle choice, people who are almost entirely motivated by a reverse techno-fetishism, people who are much more interested in gimmickery and clever technologies than they are in changing the way we live. I've already, on these pages, written about the fact that a consumerist philosophy is fundamentally incompatible with any notion of conserving resources, but you don't even have to be that abstract. Coping with the ever-decreasing amount of fossil fuels is a huge sociological change, but not one that the Green Party ever see fit to expand on. The current "recession" and people's new-found reluctance to blow their money on shit they don't need is, over the long term, going to work wonders for the world's resources; if Western culture is going to survive than it needs to change to a society where people work less, earn less, spend less, and stop generating millions of tons of carbon filling the world with crap. The most sensible and consistent thing the Greens could propose, right now, would be a four-day working week; it would generate employment, and it would start to change the shape of our society in a way that would prepare us for some difficult decades ahead.
Sorry, guys, we weren't listening... hey, have you heard about this new allotment scheme we've got?
It's worth going to the Green Party's Twitter page here, where you'll find a neat distillation of this attitude. The sentence "As equitable as possible in very, very hard times", as crass and shocking a lie as any Irish political party has ever tried to pass off in history, is just three posts above "230,000 electric cars by 2020, says E.Ryan". It's not even worth pointing out that the electric car is fuck-all use if we still generate all our electricity from fossil fuels; less than 24 hours before the government took more money off people who don't have it and used it to rescue their property-developer buddies, one of the Green Party's two ministers was prattling to the newspapers about something quirky that might happen in ten years' time.
Another Tweet (god, how horrible is that word?) has actually justified the entire existence of Twitter, even the bits about Stephen Fry. "Typical FG/Lab criticism of income levy. How do we raise €3.3bn, protect social welfare & avoid public service sackings otherwise?". (For the record, here are a few answers; high level income tax, no PRSI ceiling, corporation tax, carbon tax, cutting out the lazy overpaid middle-management nobodies in the Civil Service, and VAT on luxury goods. I came up with those just now. Can I be a minister?) Repeat it in a sulky teenage voice, and you'll perceive the problem. This is a party who responds to perfectly-justified criticisms with all the poise of a mewling teenager. In fact, watch this:-
Did you see the shot at halfway through, when Cowen and Conor Lenihan sniggered like schoolchildren as Pat Rabbitte laid into their own government partners? That's how the Green Party are really regarded. That's it exactly.
There's only so long that incompetence and ineffectuality can be a shield. This oh-so-cute little party, these Pretty Decent Lads, have used it as an excuse for too long. And if the following paragraph seems to be nearly too obvious, I'm only writing it because I haven't read it anywhere else.
The Green Party is responsible for a disgusting, evil betrayal of the most vulnerable members of the Irish populace, and I use the word "evil" with precision. Their government has systematically attacked the desperate, the needy, the hurt and the helpless, in six months that will go down as one of the most shameful periods since the civil war. They won't survive this, and they don't deserve to. Come the next election, these pathetic little men will get what they deserve, and fall flat on their sordid, self-satisfied faces.
In fact, the only surprising thing about the Bludget is just how little they seem to care about how the masses will react; it's as if Fianna Fáil don't really want to be re-elected, and have already started making plans to become panel-beaters in their spare time... but we didn't really expect it to be anything but evil, not really. Think of the big faeces in Government - sorry, I mean the big faces in government; people like Cowen, Harney, Lenihan are all uniquely distinguishable by being as physically ugly as they are ugly on the inside, and you can't help but think of them floating like fried eggs in their own congealed crapulence, burping as they slither to the kitchen like contintental drift, spending their spare time drinking the tears of small children, and thinking up new ways to tax homeless people and buy worthless land in Dubai with the revenue.
And then there's the Green Party. And here, of course, things become different. Everyone hates Fianna Fáil, obviously, but it's a passive hatred; hating Fianna Fáil is as pointless as hating fog, or sprouts, or Daleks. The Greens are a different matter.
I can't stand things that don't do what they're designed to do. The Green Party have always been seen as harmless and lovable eccentrics, the sort of people who will go and plant oregano in the window-boxes of their Dáil offices, the type of party who are quite interested in the notion of social justice and equality but not quite as excited by that as they are by the concept of compost. They have carefully portrayed themselves as Pretty Decent Lads, and if they have to take a few Minister for Parsnips jokes from Pat Rabbitte, then so be it. The Greens play a delicate game, where they are in government, but at the same time try not to be accountable for anything that bad oul' Fianna Fáil does. They keep their head down, look after their ministerial portfolios, and pat themselves on the back when they give the workers of Ireland a tax-deductible bike or two.
At this point, I could expand on the weakness of this attitude; I could point out that viewing every problem through the same distorting prism is obviously limiting, for example. I speak as someone who, objectively, has a certain sympathy with "the Green agenda", although the crucial difference is that I don't see it as an "agenda" at all. The dwindling of natural resources and the murderous prospect of climate change aren't political slants, they're objective facts; reacting this isn't an agenda, it's an essential response to the reality that millions upon millions of people have already been condemned to death, and more will follow. In other words, being "Green", as it's called, is just pragmatic planning.
However, the Green Party just don't see it that way. These are people who still see being Green as a lifestyle choice, people who are almost entirely motivated by a reverse techno-fetishism, people who are much more interested in gimmickery and clever technologies than they are in changing the way we live. I've already, on these pages, written about the fact that a consumerist philosophy is fundamentally incompatible with any notion of conserving resources, but you don't even have to be that abstract. Coping with the ever-decreasing amount of fossil fuels is a huge sociological change, but not one that the Green Party ever see fit to expand on. The current "recession" and people's new-found reluctance to blow their money on shit they don't need is, over the long term, going to work wonders for the world's resources; if Western culture is going to survive than it needs to change to a society where people work less, earn less, spend less, and stop generating millions of tons of carbon filling the world with crap. The most sensible and consistent thing the Greens could propose, right now, would be a four-day working week; it would generate employment, and it would start to change the shape of our society in a way that would prepare us for some difficult decades ahead.
Sorry, guys, we weren't listening... hey, have you heard about this new allotment scheme we've got?
It's worth going to the Green Party's Twitter page here, where you'll find a neat distillation of this attitude. The sentence "As equitable as possible in very, very hard times", as crass and shocking a lie as any Irish political party has ever tried to pass off in history, is just three posts above "230,000 electric cars by 2020, says E.Ryan". It's not even worth pointing out that the electric car is fuck-all use if we still generate all our electricity from fossil fuels; less than 24 hours before the government took more money off people who don't have it and used it to rescue their property-developer buddies, one of the Green Party's two ministers was prattling to the newspapers about something quirky that might happen in ten years' time.
Another Tweet (god, how horrible is that word?) has actually justified the entire existence of Twitter, even the bits about Stephen Fry. "Typical FG/Lab criticism of income levy. How do we raise €3.3bn, protect social welfare & avoid public service sackings otherwise?". (For the record, here are a few answers; high level income tax, no PRSI ceiling, corporation tax, carbon tax, cutting out the lazy overpaid middle-management nobodies in the Civil Service, and VAT on luxury goods. I came up with those just now. Can I be a minister?) Repeat it in a sulky teenage voice, and you'll perceive the problem. This is a party who responds to perfectly-justified criticisms with all the poise of a mewling teenager. In fact, watch this:-
Did you see the shot at halfway through, when Cowen and Conor Lenihan sniggered like schoolchildren as Pat Rabbitte laid into their own government partners? That's how the Green Party are really regarded. That's it exactly.
There's only so long that incompetence and ineffectuality can be a shield. This oh-so-cute little party, these Pretty Decent Lads, have used it as an excuse for too long. And if the following paragraph seems to be nearly too obvious, I'm only writing it because I haven't read it anywhere else.
The Green Party is responsible for a disgusting, evil betrayal of the most vulnerable members of the Irish populace, and I use the word "evil" with precision. Their government has systematically attacked the desperate, the needy, the hurt and the helpless, in six months that will go down as one of the most shameful periods since the civil war. They won't survive this, and they don't deserve to. Come the next election, these pathetic little men will get what they deserve, and fall flat on their sordid, self-satisfied faces.
Labels: budget, Green Party, pure unadulterated sociopathic evil
posted by Nyder O'Leary at
19:16
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