The Other McCain

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The Paradox Of Progressive Idiocy, Billy Bragg Edition

Posted on | February 18, 2012 | 19 Comments

by Smitty

via @s_dog on Twitter, via Tim Blair:

Billy Bragg: “Jingoism is no answer to England’s ebbing power“:

Unless and until we throw off our imperial pretensions and begin to relate to our neighbours as equals, joining with them in creating new networks of active devolution and shared sovereignty, we English are in danger of becoming an insular people, jealously guarding the right to make our own laws while increasingly unable to control our destiny.

Wait, so you control your destiny by abdicating sovereignty to your neighbors? Really? What kind of head-parked-in-the-dark lunacy is that?

I can follow a theological variation on this argument, where one is individually submitted to the will of God. But that still doesn’t dictate one follow Bragg to Jonestown. Bragg is encouraged to take himself to Jonestown, and that anti-American creep Van Jones with him.

There is nothing jingoistic whatsoever, Bragg, in caring about liberty, in England or the U.S. Nor is it jingoistic to point out that your ideas are pure ruin, laugh at you for acting a fool, and opposing your commie ills at every turn. It’s simple common sense.

Category: Great Britain, Progressivism, Uncategorized

Comments

19 Responses to “The Paradox Of Progressive Idiocy, Billy Bragg Edition”

  1. DaveO
    February 18th, 2012 @ 10:55 am

    Why is the passage so objectionable? It was a plank in Obama’s and Mrs. Clinton’s foreign policy platforms in 2008. That approach is working wonders throughout the world.

  2. Ericdondero
    February 18th, 2012 @ 11:24 am

    Oh, come on Smitty.  This is friggin’ Billy Bragg.  We knew this guy was an idiot leftist in the punk rock movement, way back in the late ’90s.  What’s the surprise here?

  3. Ericdondero
    February 18th, 2012 @ 11:25 am

    To paraphrase a well-known late ’90s hardcore punk band from SF:

    “Leftist punks, leftist punks, leftist punks… ‘F’ off!”

  4. smitty
    February 18th, 2012 @ 11:48 am

    I always thought Jello Biafra was kinda stupid-funny.

  5. EBL
    February 18th, 2012 @ 11:54 am

    I am surprised Obama did not have Billy Bragg sing for them at the White House.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJfgsG9Wgas

  6. EBL
    February 18th, 2012 @ 11:56 am

    Jello Biafra was a great prophet!  Of course you often had to buy the albums and read the lyrics to understand what he was saying.  Dirty capitalist!  

  7. Jack Reno
    February 18th, 2012 @ 1:15 pm

    “…new networks of active devolution…”

    The kind of phrase that signals you are reading a compulsive wanker.

  8. spot_the_dog
    February 18th, 2012 @ 1:23 pm

    “we English are in danger of becoming an insular people”

    Just for the sake of pedantry…

    INSULAR – Origin: mid 16th century (as a noun denoting an islander): from late Latin insularis, from insula ‘island’

    Reminds me of when our then-PM Kevin Rudd railed against Australia’s “insularity,” proclaiming on national TV “Australia is not an island!”

    Fricken Continental Drift deniers.

  9. spot_the_dog
    February 18th, 2012 @ 1:26 pm

    Seriously, though.  Wouldn’t Obama just love to subcontract out America’s sovereignty to the UN, just as England has to the EU?

  10. Adjoran
    February 18th, 2012 @ 2:12 pm

    I expect “jingoism” is less of a problem than decommissioning their last carrier, which had many years of service left in her.

    Britain today is Obama’s dream of America’s tomorrow.

  11. richard mcenroe
    February 18th, 2012 @ 2:12 pm

    Are you kidding?  He wants to extend our sovereignty to the rest of the world by Executive Fiat.  

    http://tinyurl.com/7rbpk7r 

  12. spot_the_dog
    February 18th, 2012 @ 2:56 pm

    Like @DanHannanMEP:twitter warned y’all:

    “I am living in your future, or at least the future your leaders seem intent on taking you.  And believe me, you are not going to enjoy it.”

  13. Mary
    February 18th, 2012 @ 6:49 pm

    Yet Jello Biafra is a leftist punk, in fact his green party platform was the epitome of what he purported to mock in California Uber Alles (former punk rock girl, here). I was still a fairly lefty democrat back in 1999, when Biafra was campaigning, and when he came to my state, having met him in 1979, I made a point of going up to speak with him. It was patently clear to me that he only sought to exploit the issues, didn’t give a damn about the people. He also didn’t have  a problem with Ralph Nader’s blatant hypocrisies, ie, millions in investments in the corporations, including the military industrial complex, big box stores and big pharma and Franken Food companies Nader feigned disdain for.

    Biafra is a fraud, like all Marxists, and Bragg included, hanker for a time where they can become the new feudal overlords.. they are regressive.

  14. Quartermaster
    February 19th, 2012 @ 11:12 am

    But, then, Australia is a Continent. So, Rudd was correct from a geographical and  and Geological stand point.

  15. Quartermaster
    February 19th, 2012 @ 11:13 am

    Don’t we know it. We don’t even like the road to that place.

  16. Pathfinder's wife
    February 19th, 2012 @ 12:09 pm

    To which I’d have to reply: “yeah, and I’d like to buy the world a Coke and sing in harmony”.
    However, seeing as how there are parts of the world that would like to blow my head off and my kids’ head off and other parts which would probably love to see my family living in mud hut squalor that just doesn’t seem very practical, so I’ll stand accused of jingoism and vote to keep my nation’s sovereignty, thank you.

  17. Teeing it up: A Round at the LINKs (NASCAR Edition) | SENTRY JOURNAL
    February 19th, 2012 @ 1:15 pm

    […] THE OTHER McCAIN: The Paradox Of Progressive Idiocy, Billy Bragg Edition […]

  18. AngelaTC
    February 19th, 2012 @ 5:05 pm

    So don’t go to those parts of the world. In fact, the main reason they feel that way is because we insist on going there and meddling in affairs that really aren’t any of our business.

    “Shared sovereignty”  is the problem, not the solution.  Unless America realizes that American exceptionalism is a globalist  fabrication, and we don’t actually need to (or even have a legitimate right to)  run the whole world, especially at the point of a gun, we’re gonna get blowback.

    Leaving other nations alone, as in, letting them actually be sovereign nations, would be the best policy we could adopt.  But there’s no military money t be made, so it will never happen.

  19. smitty
    February 19th, 2012 @ 5:34 pm

    ‘American Exceptionalism’, in my words, is the notion of the individual as the unit of analysis in our founding documents. Quite a historical departure there.

    I would refer to Progressivism as the ‘globalist fabrication’, the notion that Progress leads to Utopia, at the expense of the individual. It’s all Rosseau warmed over.

    In summary, your terminology blew my mind.