The rise and fall of Occupy London

No, you're not

One night last week the BBC news ran an item about the Tobin Tax on financial transactions. An economist bobbed his head up and down speaking rather earnestly about why it would be damaging. Then something extraordinary happened; the report cut to a rather nondescript person standing at the Occupy LSX camp outside St Pauls Cathedral who maintained that it definitely would be a good idea.

Why, I wondered, were they giving a few dozen oiks* like this a national platform? Why not drag someone out of the Dog and Duck and ask them? I felt like Jacobin Mugatu in Zoolander when confronted with Blue Steel; “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”.

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* Substituted by the editor for the original 'drug addicts'

Protesting is soooooooooooooo last year

Put an X in any of the many empty spaces where you think a protestor was and send your coupon to...

Late last year some students, many of whom turned out to be rather plummy middle class kids, decided it would be larks to smash up bits of London to register their annoyance at having to pay for a service they were using.

Today saw students take to London's streets again. But, perhaps because the news that universities are cutting tuition fees to compete on costs suggests the coalition's policy is working as they said, only 2,500 are estimated to have turned out. Rather embarrassingly for the revolutionaries this dismally small gathering, nearly 2,000 fewer than saw Yeovil vs Walsall in the Third Division a couple of weeks ago, was outnumbered by the Police.

That's the thing about fashions, whether for leg warmers or protests. They're fickle.

The Tea Party and the Occupy Movement: two sides of the same coin but only the former really gets it

That is, like, soooooooo Tea Party

My mother always used to tell me that what was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander. Apparently not. Many of the same people who get swivel eyed about Tea Party rallies are running out of laudatory epithets for the various ‘Occupy’ protests.

Back in January it only took a pair of crosshairs on a web page for New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to deduce that the Tea Party were behind the horrific shooting of Gabrielle Giffords.

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A woman has the right to choose...sometimes

Seriously

Laurie Penny is one of the silliest people on the planet. But she might have outdone herself.

On her New Statesman blog back during the furore over Nadine Dorries ill fated abortion law amendment Ms Penny was fulminating about the "anti-choice minority" who wanted "to roll back women's right to reproductive choice"

Well, as ever with the left, its not 'choice' Ms Penny supports, its choices she agrees with. Even cherished reproductive choices.

Less than a month after venting at the 'anti-choice' crowd Ms Penny took to the very same blog to bemoan "The selective abortion of female foetuses" around the world. She spoke of the "tens of millions of potential human beings, neglected to death, murdered at birth or (in increasing numbers) terminated when an ultrasound scan showed that a woman was due to come into the world"

Read that again and tell me how it differs from the rhetoric of the anti-abortion camp.

Cognitive dissonance, they name is Penny.