On July 19th, Ben & Jerry’s have announced that they would stop selling ice cream in the contested territories of Israel. The product is still available everywhere else in the country allowing residents to boycott it. The move is designed to … yes, well, what actually? It is designed to signal a purpose, a virtue, a moral. Ben & Jerry’s don’t just see themselves as morally superior to Israel, but also to Brazil (homophobic), Europe (xenophobic) and, most of all, America (all of it). Yet, even the kaleidoscope of madness that is their (activist) company website would not cause concern if they were just a wayward little business. They are, however, a node in the cobweb of the emerging ‘woke capitalism’ and a front-runner at that.
Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis stands up against the politisation of our major corporations and aims right at Unilever, the British-Dutch parent company. It is one step of many to reverse a larger trend. Fanatic companies everywhere pressure profit-oriented businesses into activism as well. More and more big brands feign an interest in all kind of left-wing politics. The climate is never cool enough, hate is never controlled well, police is never soft enough and prison times are never too short. Unless you bear the consequences and side effects of the agenda points, you can demand ever more and ever harder policies. The brunt will be borne by smaller businesses.
Ben & Jerry’s also donate to United4Rescue, the activist group operating the “refugee rescue ships” Sea-Eye 4 and Sea-Watch 4. They team up with organizations like ‘Science Based Targets Initiative’ that certify carbon emissions which will eventually establish a red-tape web strangling our economy. And this is the real danger. What looks liked an early hippie idea is likely to sweep away our prosperity if we don’t wake up to it.
[The sources are, as always, in the Youtube description box.]
While we still struggle with the very real consequences of the Covid-19 epidemic and our responses to it, our elites think ahead already. John Kerry (US special envoy for climate) and Ursula von der Leyen (President of the EU Commission) are on record portraying your struggles as a ‘chance’ or as an ‘opportunity.’ They gave their two cents at the World Economic Forum which pushes the Great Reset.
And while this sounds just as callous as they are, they have really only arrived at the logical end of their ideology. Your life must be reset unless you want to continue living with all your “wrong” decisions. In the eyes of the all-truth-hogging elites, people who wish to conserve their “backward” lifestyles do this for one or more of the following four reasons.
1. They are dumb.
2. They are crazy.
3. They are evil.
4. They are dependent on the false paths taken in the past.
At the first glance the only-good-no-bad choices like ‘green’, ‘renewable’ or ‘clean’ energy are only refused by monsters. After all there can be no discussion of negative effects of various technologies. They are perfect. And some left-wingers have spent decades finding the villains in soulless corporations, inanimate objects only frequented by people with jobs. The soul of the world is already bound in trees, nature and the planet.
But some left-wingers have found clemency in the concept of “path dependency.” It suggests that the change to the only-good-no-bad option were too big. Now, with costs running out of control anyway, their opportunity has come to convert the benevolent, yet previously stubborn, to pure perfection.
Meanwhile the underlying current is speeding up. The reassurance of the left that the time for only-good-no-bad options has come can be read in innumerable international treaties and, if you are German like the organiser of the World Economic Forum and the mastermind of the Great Reset, you hear it literally everywhere and all the time. And it concentrates itself in one word: sustainability.
What is in a word? A rose is a rose is a … For Elisabeth Wehling at the linguistics department of Cal in Berkeley, the answer is ‘framing.’ Framing is the emotional content a word has outside of its pure verbatim meaning. Sustainability (and far more broadly in use right now: the German equivalent ‘Nachhaltigkeit’) is a propaganda term designed to make you feel safe and well just when you are expected to consent. In German TV commercials, TV shows, news casts and other media products the word is increasingly replacing the words ‘good’, ‘permanent’, ‘lasting’, ‘safe’, ‘robust’ and ‘positive.’ Parallel to that, the new word is constantly dropped around left-wing and environmentalist policies and lifestyle choices. This is classical conditioning. The new word ‘sustainable’ is that sweet organic-flour applepie and immigration. The legions of people who don’t entertain weighing arguments for and against a choice is growing. And a solid portion still identify the first three possible reasons why you don’t agree: asininity, madness and evil.
Additionally the old ghosts of anti-Capitalism are rising from their tombs. The World Economic Forum seeks to revive the aged and almost forgotten discussion about ‘stakeholder value.’ This is the notion that businesses should not only care about money (pronounce ‘only’ with utter disdain), but also immaterial goods such as happiness of the workers, cleanliness of the ponds and the wishes of other interested parties, ominously called ‘stakeholders.’ While, at first glance, everybody agrees on the basic idea of kindness to women, blacks, customers, gays, borrowers and other potential stakeholders of a given enterprise, the notion is operated primarily as an excuse for external involvements. One face of this is the current diversity management swamp bogging Western corporations.
The Great Reset would be a lame duck if the only-good-no-bad option were merely about organic flour freeing us from our sin of baking with ordinary flour. The pepper is the professed urgency of the climate change. When Greta Thunberg started as a child, we had 12 years to go until the point of no return. The Swedish pro-panic activist is now at an age at which Britney Spears had already preserved her virginity with Justin Timberlake and I have no idea what clock the left is counting down right now. But the idea of utmost urgency is still at the heart of their mission.
The discussion of the urgency of the climate change is fundamental to understand what changes a society must accept, but such discussions have no place in a good-good-sustainable-good world.
Goldstein 