Where would righties be without lazy thinking?

Another classic from Hannan this morning. His blog’s headline is “Where would lefties be without hatred”? I would ask him the same question but replace the word “leftie” with “rightie”. Mad Dan has taken this idea that people on the left are ‘hateful’ from the US right who will often use the word as a riposte whenever their ideas or their leaders are questioned “You’re so hateful”! It’s puerile stuff and demonstrates an inability to formulate a coherent counter-argument on the part of the person speaking. The blog is articulated around Richard Curtis’s new video (is Curtis really a ‘leftie’ or his position merely relative to the right wing nuttery of Hannan?).

However reading through the blog, it quickly becomes apparent that he’s talking about “animal lovers” whom he alleges are “people loathers”,

I’ve noticed before that a surprising number of animal lovers are really people loathers. Not all, of course, nor even most; but some. In every age and nation, there are people casting about for a valid reason to detest their neighbours.

So what are you saying here? Or do you even know?  But let’s be clear about something, Hannan is no animal lover; he’s an apologist for corrida. He moans about how “vegans” and “little old ladies”  castigated him for his views,

Animals can be a handy cause for people seeking to justify their dislike of humans. There are always men casting around for a way to validate their sociopathic tendencies. A hundred years ago, they claimed to be outraged on behalf of the proletariat. Then, when working people found their own political representatives, the Angry Young Men took to championing colonials who were less likely to speak for themselves.

Pardon?  It looks like he’s having another cheap pop at the ‘left’ again. I wonder if he realizes that the rakish Alan Clark, Tory minister, Europhobe and racist was an animal lover and a vegetarian? Incidentally, Clark once claimed that he was a “Nazi” in response to The Guardian’s allegation that he was a fascist. He wasn’t joking either. Clark wouldn’t have approved of Corrida and would have had something to say to Hannan about the matter.

Funnily enough there is no mention of left wingers save for a brief mention of the Greens. But are they really left wing? I’ve never thought of Jonathon Porritt or Sara Parkin as left wing. Maybe Desperate Dan knows something that we don’t? He says,

I have Green friends

Good for you. I don’t really trust the Greens.

Throughout the blog, he links back to his other blogs where he makes ignorant comments like this one,

One of the things you pick up very early in the world of blogging and Twitter is how fond Lefties are of the word “evil”, as in “evil Tory scum”. Having dismissed the concept of evil as traditionally understood by monotheistic religions, they have transferred the label to a set of beliefs of which they disapprove.

I don’t know how many real ‘lefties’ you know but it sounds like you’ve been spending too much time around Freakrepublic. He finishes with this,

Hatred, like evil, is very important to a certain kind of Leftie. Not, let me stress, all Lefties: plenty of socialists accept that there are other valid points of view. The funny thing is that the ones who hate the hardest tend to be the ones who aspire to the highest of the moral high ground.

So what are you saying? Are you trolling?

This is bizarre,

Capitalism is the most moral economic system yet devised. It lets people become rich to the extent that they provide a service for others. That’s not to say that capitalism is perfect, simply that every alternative system leaves people poorer and less free.

How is capitalism “moral”? There is a great deal of faulty thinking evident in this paragraph. Which “alternative system” is he referring to? In his desire to praise-song late capitalism, Dan’s thinking takes a turn down a familiar cul-de-sac: it is here where he would ordinarily make his Hayekian claim that’ socialism leads to tyranny’ and would normally bring in the Stalinist USSR as his single piece of supporting evidence.

Ah, where would righies be without lazy thinking?