You Cut, We Choose

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Whenever cake was on the table and me and my sister were in the queue for some, to forestall the inevitable arguments about whose slice was bigger, my mum imposed the old “You cut, she chooses” rule.

Never has my eye been keener or my hand steadier – I doubt experienced brain surgeons could have surpassed me in those moments.

And I can think of three occasions when those demanding some change to the status quo should be asked to endure this test.

The first is when, as now, commentators from a particular side of the aisle ask that free speech be denied.

To which the obvious answer is – “Fine. As long as WE always get to decide whose speech is denied.”

The second is when activists who hold a particular position want to enact policies and it’s suspected it is merely a pretext for their preferred ideology – James Delingpole has laid out very nicely how the Green Blob tends to be leftist, and there is a simple solution to that.

Please confine your recommendations to free market ones.

And the third is politicians proposing new laws.

Obamacare was a good example of politicians (in America in this case) imposing rules and regulations on their citizenry, but then quietly agreeing to exempt themselves from them.

The answer of course is something like “Yes we’ll impose these new laws. But only on lawmakers and their families, for the first five years”

That should put a stop to the warmongering too?

“Yes we’ll go to war – as long as your children are on the front line driving lightly-armoured Land Rovers, wearing sub-standard body armour and carrying rifles so bad they were dubbed the Civil Servant”*

*they won’t work, and you can’t fire them

You cut, we choose.

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Jason Lynch
Jason Lynch
5 years ago

Please, not the lazy myths about the L85 rifle? When it’s been torture-tested in dust, sand, Arctic and jungle, and outperformed its “competitors of preferred choice”, and been preferred after a decade of TELIC and HERRICK, you’d think someone might have twigged that if it didn’t work, we’d have replaced it by now. To summarise the final round of trials (Op NERINE) – before accepting it and rolling out the full update, the Army did a comparative trial of the L85A2 against all of its 5.56 competitors; temperate, hot/wet, hot/dry, extreme cold. It came out the most reliable. This caused… Read more »

Matt Ryan
Matt Ryan
5 years ago
Reply to  Jason Lynch

To look ally you need a cool gat – simples.

Leo Savantt
Leo Savantt
5 years ago
Reply to  Jason Lynch

The SA80A2 is a fine 5.56, unless you are a lefty (apolitically speaking).

Phoenix44
Phoenix44
5 years ago
Reply to  Jason Lynch

Pretty sure that being in the Army means you have to complain about everything all the time?

Jonathan Harston
Jonathan Harston
5 years ago

On the eco-loon subject, I’ve been shouting at every news report today about recommendations to use land for plant-based food instead of meat-based food. “Instead of growing animal food, they should be growing human food”.

Argh! Morons! Have these idiots never looked out of the window of their unicorn-powered ivory towers. As an example, sheep are grown where they are because you can’t grow anything else there. The alterative to growing sheep isn’t growing cabbages, it *not* *growing* *anything* *at* *all*.

Andrew Carey
Andrew Carey
5 years ago

Testable claim – remove the record breaking subsidies for owners of land on which sheep are produced and see if any entrepreneurs or innovators want to buy the land and use it for something else,
Object you might, but if you do then you don’t believe your own claim and you don’t believe in having a market economy.

Jonathan Harston
Jonathan Harston
5 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Carey

I was struggling to stay awake, but I’m sure the late evening news had a couple of faming-related people on, who were almost agreeing that subsidies should be removed from farmers.

Phoenix44
Phoenix44
5 years ago

The basic point is that land is farmed (ignoring the subsidies point) in whatever way makes the Farmer richest because that way makes us the richest we could be. Any change in what the farmer does will make hi/her and us poorer. Something the BBC and others seem to think it utterly unimportant.

Boganboy
Boganboy
5 years ago

I have always felt that calling something hate speech is hate speech, just as calling someone a racist is racist.

Davidsb
Davidsb
5 years ago

Don’t know if it’s still the case, but when the ‘No smoking in public buildings’ laws came in, the two exemptions were prisons and the Houses of Parliament……

;¬)

Jonathan Harston
Jonathan Harston
5 years ago
Reply to  Davidsb

I actually wrote to my local MP pointing out that prisons should be exempt, because they are not public buildings, they are – for the duration of their sentence – people’s homes.

He completely missed the point, saying he’d whip the party to oppose the bill because they were the opposition.

The fall-out from not properly engaging in improving laws as they are being written came out later as home-care workers whose “work place” is people’s homes and so a work place clashes with people’s homes being people’s homes and so not a work place.

James Morgan
James Morgan
5 years ago

Alex that’s exactly what my Mum did with me and my brother. You cut he chooses. She knew my Mum. She knew.