Via Samizdata, the latest little bit of New Labour control freakery…
Drinking bottled water should be made as unfashionable as smoking, according to a government adviser.
“We have to make people think that it’s unfashionable just as we have with smoking. We need a similar campaign to convince people that this is wrong,” said Tim Lang, the Government’s naural resources commissioner.
Excuse me? What, exactly is wrong with drinking bottles water, I wonder? Is some illumination to be offered? There is nothing wrong with drinking bottled water, absolutely nothing. Tim Lang can go fuck himself. If I want to drink bottled water – and I might just feel inclined to nip out now and buy a bottle – then I damned well will and no amount of government advisors telling me that they think it is wrong will have any impact. I’ll drink it as much as I like and I will be brazen about it.
Phil Woolas, the environment minister, added that the amount of money spent on mineral water “borders on being morally unacceptable”.
No, what is morally unacceptable is puritanical government ministers forgetting that they serve us, not the other way around; what is morally unacceptable is government ministers poking about in our private lives where they have no right to be; what is morally unacceptable is arseholes like Phil Woolas treating us like children; what is morally unacceptable is some shit-for-brains-wannabe-tyrant like Phil Woolas daring to presume that government is the font of morality (party funding, anyone?) and has the effrontery to assume that he has the moral right to lecture us about anything.
Their comments come as new research shows that drinking a bottle of water has the same impact on the environment as driving a car for a kilometre.
Ah, yes, I might have guessed… global fucking warming. Any little attempt to clamp down on our liberty has global fucking warming as the excuse.
Conservation groups and water providers have started a campaign against the £2 billion industry.
Oh, not too much vested interest there, then. The water companies want to put the competition out of business… Sheesh! There’s a surprise. Well, let’s put it this way, if they go ahead and forcibly medicate us through our drinking water, then I’ll be drinking solely from a bottle. Besides, a bottle of lightly carbonated spring water is more pleasant than the stuff that comes out of the tap – even if the tap water is wholesome. The issue here is “choice”.
As Perry points out:
Very telling, no? People deciding to spend their own money on something “borders on being morally unacceptable”. Let me what you what is morally unacceptable: that force addicted control freak tax parasites like Phil Woolas having the gall to tell people how to spend their own damn money. “Immoral”? You do not know the meaning of the word, Woolas.
So, the evidence for this welter of CO2?
A BBC Panorama documentary, “Bottled Water: Who Needs It?”, to be broadcast tomorrow says that in terms of production, a litre bottle of Evian or Volvic generates up to 600 times more CO2 than a litre of tap water.
Oh, well, if the BBC says it’s so, it must be true – after all, they keep telling us that the planet is burning up, the seas are going to rise and flood us all and the polar bears are dying out despite their numbers being on the increase. I wonder what Evian and Volvic will have to say about this?
Just about everything we do has some sort of impact. Consequently, I forsee ever more attempts to return us to the middle ages. So, having set in motion the war on people smoking and drinking alcohol, it is the bottled water drinkers who are now in the line of fire. Indeed, as time passes we see more and more of the nasty totalitarian underbelly of the political class as they seek to regulate every aspect of our lives. A generation of Britons went to war to defend these islands from this type of fascism. The lion sleeps, unfortunately. What, I wonder, will it take to awaken it? And, when it does wake, will it be too late?
Ever notice how these pronouncements are always made in the passive voice?:
‘It is morally unacceptable’ (who makes that judgement?);
‘it is unethical’ (who says this?);
‘attitudes must be changed’ (by whom? Why?);
‘should be made as unfashionable’ (by whom? Why? Whose moral judgement is involved?);
Etc, etc.
If we merely ask ourselves ‘who is saying this’, and then rephrase the assertion, all becomes clear:
‘the State/minister/government flunky/government-funded-scientist believes that we should not be able to do thus and such….’
I suspect the use of the passive voice is no accident: it makes the pronouncement sound 1) as though it’s an incontrovertible fact with which all right-thinking people must agree, and 2) its enforcement is as inevitable as the diktat of a deity.
So, if you want some fun, next time you see the passive voice being used, recast it as ‘active voice’, determine who the speaker is, and you’ll rapidly see just how nakedly evil such assertions truly are.
PS: The use of ‘we’, as in ‘we need to…’ by Commissar Lang, is equally telling. Who the hell is ‘we’? Himself? His freaky friends? Who?
Clearly, of course, ‘we’ is the government (quelle surprise), which appears to have forgotten that IT is subject to US, not the reverse.
At least, that’s how it’s supposed to beo….
Well f*** me, if you don’t mind me saying.
“First they came for the fox hunters, then they came for the smokers, then they came for the [insert long list] but by the time they came for the patio heaters and the bottled water drinkers, the people rose up and said a joke’s a joke, but this has gone too far, now just f*** off and leave us in peace”
Mark Wadsworth’s last blog post..Top tips for tourists in Venice
The gentlemen above already wrote what I was thinking when reading this post, and therefore saved me from loosing contenance, i.e. perhaps uttering morally unacceptable words. Thanks.