European politicians have promised “full and speedier” measures to stem the tide of cheap Chinese imports
European politicians, working night and day to make us all poorer.
Seriously, fuck off.
What in buggery is wrong with these people? Cheap stuff is good.
I would say it depends what you are buying. Cheap smartphone yes. Cheap parachutes no.
@Salamander
Nothing intrinsically wrong with a cheap parachute. An expensive parachute which fails is shit, a cheap one which opens is fine.
I wonder . . . (illegal?) immigrant labor in the U.S. isn’t valued because they are cheaper (a straw man), they are valued because they are reliable, hard working, and drama free. Government regs have turned U.S. workers into matinee queens.
No no no Tim. Cheap stuff is BAD. It’s “consumption” which offends Mother Earth by raping her of her natural resources.
NB People of the Left are entitled to wealth and consumption as a reward for their provision of essential moral guidance to the lower orders, and because they will consume wisely rather than selfishly satisfying their bestial desires like the said lower orders.
I wonder . . . (illegal?) immigrant labor in the U.S. isn’t valued because they are cheaper (a straw man), they are valued because they are reliable, hard working, and drama free. Government regs have turned U.S. workers into matinee queens.
A pal of mine comes from a family which own a restaurant in SC (he went to USC, hence I know who the Gamecocks are), and he said the same thing: his head Mexican in his restaurant’s kitchen has been there 20 years and is illegal. He takes home more than a lot of Americans, but they won’t do the job.
Tim
You know as well as anybody that for a politician to say that is political death by BBC/twatter/grauniad and the dead tree press generally… and a lost election at the end of it.
Nobody can be arsed to make or to listen to and try to understand this argument.
In a world of instant gratification it’s just too much bovver.
Thus I am coming to believe human civilisation is cyclical and that we are irrevocably on a downslope of moral turpitude combined with intellectual and physical laziness and I’m glad I won’t be around in 50 years time or 150.
I hope it’s not too bad for the next 20 or so.
‘Thus I am coming to believe human civilisation is cyclical and that we are irrevocably on a downslope’
Decadence will kill the West as dead as it killed the Romans.
Decadence didn’t kill the Romans. They got more moral on the way down (Christianity and all that).
I don’t know (well, I do, that was rhetorical) why people think we are in an era of declining morality and “turpitude”. We are living in an era of exceedingly shrill and omnipresent morality. We call it “Political Correctness” and the like.
It may be that civilisational decline is heralded not by moral decline, but by excessive and boneheaded moral systems, be they Christianity or PC.
@ Ian B
“political correctness” is not morality.
Over a century ago someone said “Licence they mean when they cry “Liberty””
Yeah, someone will have the quote to hand but I’ve spent more than 13 hours working (excluding my share of housework) today and I’m too tired to look it up.
john77, agreed. PC is not morality because it doesn’t apply if the female or ‘minority’ person happens to be a conservative.
Politics and economic villainy did Rome in not Christianity. Christian Byzantium lasted another thousand years.
PC is poison squeezed out of the anal glands of socialism.
” as a reward for their provision of essential moral guidance to the lower orders”
I’ve found it amusing how many senior seriously Left people have inherited equally serious amounts of money. I can’t afford socialism, myself.
The factory closure story is journalism bread and butter.Twas every thus. I do find interesting one thing though. Journalists divided on the use of ‘flooding’ to describe spikes in people seeking to enter a labour market are all as one in employing it to describe the effect of foreign competition in global industrial product markets.
PC is decadence. The West has become so successful that it thinks it can toy with freedom of speech. It erodes the foundation of Western Civilization. The public thinks it can afford to dick around with people’s rights. It can’t, but the payback will take time. The University of Missouri is experiencing some of it now.
“That’s racist” is the sound of the death of Western Civilization.
PC is a moral code, and it is not in any meaningful sense “decadence”. People really need to understand that a moral system is a moral system even if you don’t agree with it because your moral system is different.
Anyone who thinks PC is some kind of libertine “licence” must be living in a parallel Bizarro universe.
(And the important point that liberty is this hated “licence” thing anyway is another issue, but an important one. The “liberty not licence” argument basically boils down to “liberty is the right to do things I approve of but not those that I don’t approve of”, which is the same as any non-libertarian moral system. It’s just shoving the things you don’t like into this “licence” bin).