Gun Culture

Monday, August 11, 2008

Guardianista Stereotypes True. Shocker.

This response to a post on a bushcraft forum discussing a man cautioned for carrying a lock knife is so tragically spot on the muesli munching stereotype it almost must be a joke.  Right?

OK. I used to be a journalist for the Guardian newspaper, and probably, therefore, a bloody good anti-liberal/left target for a fair few members of this forum (God knows, my guilty, white, middle-class sensibilities leave me cringing every now and then). BUt I think you are way missing the point. Do you really equate modern Great Britain with a police state? If so, then grow up! Ask yourself this, would you rather live in GB or nazi Germany or Iraq under Saddam Hussein? Of course you wouldn’t. That is no defence, of course, but you are so wide of the mark of how you think a police state works. It is often said that no government is more than three meals away from anarchy. If you truly think that GB (and I note with interest that you reside in Belgium) is even CLOSE to being a police state then you have no idea, at all, how government works. The current political climate may not suit you (which is, I presume, your immature reason for claiming it to be a police state) but it suits the majority of the population. You, or I, or any other member of this forum, may have a problem with that. If so, then tough! That’s the way democracy works- the government tries to please the majority of the citizens. Is that ideal? Of course not! Do you/I/we like that? Clearly not, on occasion. But that’s the way democracy works. A government by the people, for the people. But don’t be so immatuer as to assume that the government of GB has anything in common with Zimbabwe, nazi Germany, or any other host of TRUE police states. The fact you can make such a claim shows the lie to your impotent little fist thumping. Don’t be so silly.
Oh, and bloody good it is too, that the government has curtailed your’s, and anyone else’s ‘shooting and hunting’. Totally unnecessary in a society where you can buy your meat and produce from a butchers (if you want to avoid the multi-national corporations and supermarkets) - people with inflammatory natures such as yourself should NOT be allowed to go hunting, quite frankly. Too dangerous.

So we don’t live in a ‘proper’ police state OK?  Such things as detention without trial, prosecution for thought crime, curtailed freedom of expression, lack of freedom of association, ID cards on the horizon, DNA databases, CCTV on every corner - these are neither here nor there.  Provided you aren’t actually being fed feet first into a woodchipper by the son of the President then things are hunk dory and you do not live in a police state.
Note that these people are generally the same wankers who insist that the definition of poverty seems to be the lack of a 32” or bigger widescreen telly and only one foreign holiday a year.  Hmmm.
Wankers.