A few days ago,
the ever-excellent Daily Mash satirised Boris's alcohol ban.
BORIS Johnson is to ban Scotsmen from the London Underground in a bid to make the Tube more bearable for everyone else.
The London mayor said a Scots-free Tube would be less intimidating for ordinary travellers, and would not smell so badly of chips, blood, spilt lager and urine.
He said: "As we all know the Scot is incapable of sitting on anything with wheels attached unless already drunk, or carrying enough booze to knock out an Irish bank manager and his wife for a weekend."
Most amusing, I must say. What has not been amusing is the reaction to
my post of yesterday, protesting against the alcohol ban.
You see, I had rather naively imagined that the majority of people actually understood the concept of liberty; I certainly thought that readers of The Kitchen might get it. It seems that, in a large number of cases, I was entirely wrong.
To say that this is disappointing is a massive understatement.
The attitude of many of the commenters does remind me of a comment that I saw on a forum some years ago, which was along these lines.
That's the British for you. They love to talk about liberty, but they become fascists when confronted with things that they personally dislike.
That has pretty much been the attitude of many of the commenters, and it is the same deeply illiberal attitude that has allowed the cunt politicians to rape our freedoms.
Boris Johnson: still a totalitarian cunt. Just like many of my commenters.The arguments, such as they are, appear to have two prongs. The first is the most lame and essentially goes like this:
I would never have a drink on the Tube, so who cares?
I don't think that I can possibly make a more eloquent argument against this attitude
than did Pastor Niemoller, frankly.
The second argument is no less facile, but let's have a look anyway, shall we? This second prong can essentially be summed up in this hastily-constructed syllogism:
If people drink too much alcohol then they will get drunk.
Some drunk people make trouble on public transport.
Therefore we should ban everyone from drinking alcohol on public transport.
It is a completely stupid fucking argument, really, and is born of the pusillanimous and totalitarian tendences inherent in the average
Daily Mail reader.
First, not everyone who drinks is drunk. I gave the example of consuming one beer on the way home; it was very pleasant, since from Southfields to Earl's Court is,
like 55% of the Tube, not actually underground. The sun was streaming through the windows, the carriage was about only about half full, my Private Eye was interesting, and the gentle rocking of the train was complemented by my lovely bottle of cool ale.
The ale was all the more welcome since my colleague, who gives me a lift from Ockham to Southfields, needed to drop into the supermarket (where I had bought my beer) to buy his week's supplies and I didn't even get onto the Tube until nearly seven in the evening. With an hour on the Tube ahead of me, the beer really appealed.
The general tone of the comments was, first,
"well, couldn't you have had a few pints before going home" (no. Have you been to Ockham recently?) and,
"well, couldn't you have waited." Yes, yes, I could have waited, but why should I? Just because you wouldn't drink on the Tube does not mean that I should not be allowed to do so.
Was I drunk? No.
As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, when this policy was announced, how many people actually
get drunk on public transport? Very few.
Have I
been drunk on the Tube? Certainly I have. But not all drunk people cause trouble on public transport. I have never abused anyone, never shouted at anyone, never acted in a threatening way to anyone, never vomited on anyone, never... Well, you get the picture. I did once fall asleep on the Victoria Line and go to Brixton to Seven Sisters and back again, but I wasn't leaning or dribbling on anyone and I was more tired than drunk (I hadn't slept all night).
Have I been the subject of threatening behaviour on the Tube? No, but in Edinburgh I was once beaten up by a drunk guy, for no reason whatsoever. But because I am not a totalitarian cunt, I did not call for alcohol to be banned. Do you see?
So, so far we have established that drinking on the public transport does not automatically cause a nuisance, and that being drunk on public transport does not automatically cause a nuisance. OK?
So what is the issue? The problem is loud and threatening behaviour by certain people; sometimes these people are drunk. Sometimes they are sober.
A number of commenters think that, because these people are sometimes drunk, that we should ban drinking on public transport.
But sometimes people are cunts when they are sober; thus, the logical extension of this is that we should ban sobriety on public transport.
Because we pride ourselves on being a liberal society, we have framed our laws to deal with this problem. What we have done is only to legislate against the threatening behaviour, whether it is committed by someone drunk or sober.
This is only right; we recognise that neither being drunk nor drinking is actually a crime; it harms no one but the person consuming the alcohol.
In short, the problem is that the laws against threatening behaviour are not being upheld (nor, indeed, are the drunk and disorderly laws). That is a failure of policing, not a reason for more bans. The simple fact is that it doesn't matter how many laws you pass: if they aren't being enforced, then they are utterly pointless.
But those who commented on my last post would ban drinking on the Tube because it
might lead to a crime. Do I have to spell out the logical conclusion of this position?
Oh, OK then.
Ultimately, being alive might lead to someone committing a crime so we should actually ensure that no one is born. We should sterilise everyone and then, eventually, we will have a crime-free society. When everyone is dead.
The commenters who are in favour of this ban are entitled to their opinions, of course; but don't you ever dare call yourself libertarian, or even liberal. You are nasty, totalitarian, little cunts and you personify everything that is wrong with this country.
I despise you.
UPDATE: some people
still don't get it. Showing a quite astonishing level of delusion and wishful thnking
is commenter Zorro.
Why do you think it would be acceptable for him NOT to do this when he pledged to do so?
He should never have pledged to do so in the first place. Boris has, himself, styled himself as a libertarian; we can now see that this is absolute horseshit.
But the really weird bit is this next paragraph.
[Emphasis mine.]Obviously not everything Boris or the coming Tory govt of 2009/2010 will do some things we don't like. Obviously, evert bastard govt does. But they will be less corrupt, less authoritarian (a little), less stupid, less spendy, in the end, less government. Which is good and the best outcome we can reasonably hope for.
So, the Tories are going to be
"less authoritarian" and deliver
"less government"? How can you possibly think this?
Boris, as
The Nameless One points out, is now the most powerful Tory in the country and his policies are going to give some indication of what a Tory government might be like.
And Boris's
very first act is to implement a policy that is
more authoritarian than that of NuLabour's representative. It is a policy that involves
more government interference in our daily lives (and if you think that this is the end of such policies then you are even more stupid than I thought).
Seriously, Zorro, what kind of weird, parallel universe are you living in?