How long has it been a crime to keep Buttercup in the dark?

The Daily Mail ^ | 16th October 2009 | Richard Littlejohn

[Eurotwit]

Today's edition of You Couldn't Make It Up comes from Yorkshire, where a farmer has been fined £150 for 'failing to meet the psychological and ethological needs' of a cow.

I still can't believe I've just written that sentence.

Ronald Norcliffe's offence was to keep his cattle in a barn without electric light. When did that become a crime?

If ever a case illustrated the absurdity of Britain's grotesque punishment culture, this is it.

As I said here on Tuesday, all sense of reason and proportion has been jettisoned in the relentless pursuit of 'criminals' by our bloated, self-righteous, self-perpetuating, self-justifying bureaucracy.

[Eurotwit]

"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. "

Tocqueville on Democratic Despotism

[Eurotwit]

From last week’s Littlejohn:

Britain leads the world in self-righteous, self-perpetuating bureaucracy.

Government has constructed a grotesque, gargantuan punishment culture, in our faces round the clock.

All proportion and common sense have been crushed. We are the most bullied and spied-upon nation in the so-called free world.

It is now virtually impossible for anyone in Britain to go through life without falling foul of authority. Day after day, irritating new rules and regulations are churned out.

Yesterday, for instance, brought a number of prime examples of the onslaught of state interference in our lives. It was announced that householders will be fined £1,000 if they put their potato peelings in the wrong bin.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1219939/Britain-doesnt-HAVE-worst-place-live-Europe-.html#ixzz0U6aq77Ua

[SF_Redux]

interesting read here;

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/detoc/ch4_06.htm

[OB1kNOb]

H1N1 is not the pandemic we need to be concerned about. It’s liberal insanity. It’s global and apparently spreading exponentially.

[Eurotwit]

Thanks. That site will save me from a trip to the library :-)

Tocqueville was not only an eminent political theorist, but he was also a prophet.

Cheers.

[Sender]

"The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed--would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper--the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you."

- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 1

"Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too - all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides - made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions... Suggestions from the State."

- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Ch. 2

"A squat, grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the ... main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY."

- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Ch. 1

[Eurotwit]

Interesting.

I just read a political science thesis the other day where Tocqueville’s concept of democratic despotism was likened to the vision of Aldous Huxley in a Brave New World.

[pallis]

Here is a man who didn’t subject his cows to the grueling, unnatural cycle of artificial light, and he is being persecuted for it. Further evidence of his humane character can be demonstrated by the way he allowed his cows the comfort of a barn, rather than making them endure the harshness of mother nature. Go figure.