The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

THE LAST DITCH

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Of “The Year Reheated” and my blood running cold

Published by Tom

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davidthompson: The Year Reheated.

I used to read David Thompson‘s blog back in the day when blogging was the future. You remember, that time before Twitter admitted the ADD types, the narcissists, the shriekingly thoughtless conformists and (thank goodness) the occasional pithy wit to the online conversation. I found my way back there this morning thanks to a Facebook link from another legend of those days, The Devil. 
 
The post will make you laugh or cry depending upon  your predisposition to optimism or pessimism.  My first reaction was to laugh. Then I pondered the idiocies of my own student days. We thought we had trounced the authoritarian leftists of the “no platform for fascists and racists” campaign with our support for free speech. But then we went off into the real world to generate wealth and they stayed in the fact-free fairyland of academia and the public sector. Yet  they won because here we are thirty years later with their regime of “hate crimes” and “political correctness”. Here we are with a police force that openly states it will not investigate real crimes against us and our property but WILL show up mob-handed to arrest dissident tweeters. 
 
The great challenge of our age is to purge academia and the state of the enemies of Western thought. Alas that’s not funny at all.

7 responses to “Of “The Year Reheated” and my blood running cold”

  1. Epikouros Avatar
    Epikouros

    Those seeking to bring about the Orwellian world of 1984 are it appears having considerable success. If they do actually succeed completely then they will not only be instrumental in the destruction of my section of society that cherishes freedom of speech and expression and all the other civil liberties that are associated with it but also their own. Those who create tyranny are generally the first to fall victim to that tyranny.

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  2. JuliaM Avatar
    JuliaM

    And it’s not easy either.

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  3. Tom Avatar
    Tom

    It never fails to astonish me how divorced they are from that reality. The freedom of expression they disdain is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for the lives they lead. If they manage to suppress it, the effect will be similar to that which the arrival of Islam had on the previously creative and inventive Arab world. No more algebra, just a lot of rocking back and forth reading hallowed texts. It’s rather similar to their disdain for the economically productive, despite the fact they are the people who ultimately fund their parasitical lives. They really imagine that wealth just exists in uncared for lumps, as if the rich sat on plundered piles of it like dragons, rather than having constantly to strive (or hire others to strive) to keep it in productive use.

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  4. Tom Avatar
    Tom

    Little of value is!

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  5. Pogo Avatar
    Pogo

    …rather like “Scrooge McDuck” sitting, gloating, on his huge pile of Dollar bills. 🙂

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  6. Tom Avatar
    Tom

    Exactly. I talked to a Marxist academic at a conference in the Barbican once, who said he felt uncomfortable behind enemy lines in the City. I asked him if he had a private pension plan, savings fund or life assurance and when he said yes, pointed out that those “enemies” were managing the investments that underlay them. Not to mention that the Square Mile in which he felt so uncomfortable generates tax revenues that pay amongst other things his salary as a tenured academic in a state financed institution. When I was showing Russian colleagues around London they kept pointing at big buildings and saying “who owns that?”, expecting me to answer with some oligarch’s name. My answer was “probably me, among millions of others” because the genius of capital markets is that they aggregate all our money and put it to work. The few really rich people are mostly an irrelevance, except for the role they play in initiating opportunities for the little guys to invest in and taking the losses on failed projects that never go far enough for the little guys to get involved.

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  7. James Higham Avatar
    James Higham

    Going to steal and quote that.

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Your blogger

Tom is a retired international lawyer. He was a partner in a City of London law firm and spent almost twenty years abroad serving clients from all over the world.

Returning to London on retirement in 2011, he was dismayed to discover how much liberty had been lost in the UK while he was away.

He’s a classical liberal (libertarian, if you must) who, like his illustrious namesake, considers that

“…government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”

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