Desperate Measures for Desperate people Desperately Need to “Save” Something-or Other

Apparently the normally single-minded Red Ken of of two minds, based on whatever hack Journo is standing in front of him. Mr. Croydonian hizzelf notes of him saying one thing:

As to Livingstone, he goes that wee bit further and comments "I would be quite happy to ban under size models throughout the entire fashion world.“ A lot of the women on catwalks look disturbing. The idea that anything about this is attractive is just bizarre". And how do you look to them?

Displaying all the great intellectual consistency of someone trying to please anyone standing in front of them, his likeminded crackheaded fellow travelers will also go along with any obvious cause du jour, no matter how over-zealous the cutsie-poo seeming disaster of a idea it is. This is the kind of thing that gets you those “backs whole-heartedly, sincerely, and with gravity” kind of quotes even from a dour Scottish Marxist who would change his ideology weekly and in the finest of monarchical traditions was not elected to his position by the Proletariat, Cadres, or even the Great People’s Commisariat for Enlightenment.

The British government is planning to build a series of "eco-towns" that are not only environmentally friendly but designed to fight obesity as well.

As part of the latest push to deal with climate change, Prime Minister Gordon Brown earlier this year announced that he wanted to see ten new "eco-towns" built throughout Britain by 2020.

Which would kill several birds with one stone, or if you prefer blunt several daggers of the mind with one bad policy (since the birds and stones are precious and holy). Not to mention kill off the traditional “eco-city” with new development of “eco-cities”, ban those emaciated obese young women, and convince his arrogant self that he’s “saved” something or other – even if with bulldozers and cranes which for political purposes will temporarily be called green in spite of mandatory never ending homage to Rachel Corrie.

Johnson said that these towns would have cycling lanes and parks accessible to everyone. Children would be encouraged to play more sports, eat less junk food and would be regularly weighed at school.

And marched off to mass gymnastics shortly therafter in a sign of how the children freely support the never-ending revolution and accept being weighed in like either military enlistees or a new, ecologically inspired plan to divert protein out of the waste stream.

But this form of determinism is nothing new. Most lefty do-gooders are willing to commit blood and treasure on any ego-massaging idea that involves taking away anything they feel was ill gotten, like the earnings of people who have the temerity to work. Notably those all-knowing Swedes fond of believing that they’re mission on this earth is to “save” something or other:

”Gender inequality is one of the main reasons for poverty in a world where 99 percent of the world’s total wealth is owned by men and where 90 percent of the total incomes globally are earned by men.”

Where does the above quote come from? To begin with, it is of course as wrong as it can get. In a country such as the UK women own more wealth than men. And more than two percent of global wealth is owned by the British. So even in that one single country, women own more than one percent of the world’s total wealth. Are we to assume that women’s ownership in all other countries is negative?

The quote is of course nothing more than a modern myth spread among left-wing gender feminists. But where did this quote actually come from? Young radical social democrats in Skåne? Leftist college students in Örebro Campus? In fact, the quote is actually from the Swedish aid agency SIDA.

In a recently published report, Fredrik Segerfeldt at think-tank Timbro looks at policy documents published by SIDA. Segerfeldt concludes that the aid agency does not have a realistic world view, relying on ideology rather than facts and logic.

For example, SIDA concludes that the poor countries have had little gain from increased international trade and increases in global investments. The reality is however that economic development amongst the poor countries, based very much on the above factors and economic liberalization, has meant that the number of people living on less than a dollar a day has been reduced by some 500 million since 1981.

Furthermore, SIDA explicitly claims that they view poverty as a relative rather than absolute term. This basically socialist view of poverty implies that North Korea would be less poor than South Korea, as long as incomes were distributed equally among the inhabitants of North Korea. The fact that those living in North Korea would still be extremely poor in terms of material wellbeing compared to their southern neighbours has little relevance in this slanted perspective.

Cause they’re all about “making a difference” no matter what it is. To clear up that bit of lunacy, one need go no further than find 100 words or less from Thomas Sowell.

I would be scared to death to "make a difference" in the way pilots fly airliners or brain surgeons operate. Any difference I might make could be fatal to many people.
Making a difference makes sense only if you are convinced that you have mastered the subject at hand to the point where any difference you might make would be for the better.
Very few people have mastered anything that well beyond their own limited circle of knowledge. Even fewer seem to think far enough ahead to consider that question. Yet hardly a day goes by without news of some uninformed busybodies on one crusade or another.

To the world’s emotionally needy self-appointed do-gooders those words alone are a sort of high Colonic that one would hope could free their Chi of their chillingly harmful impulses and contradictions like engaging in neo-communist “new city for the new man” construction, and banning obese/emaciated runway models who can’t possibly possess more than 1% of the earth’s wealth.