The Angry Exile: Yerwot?

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [...] We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

The Hangman

Into our town the Hangman came,
Smelling of gold and blood and flame.
And he paced our bricks with a diffident air,
And built his frame in the courthouse square.
The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
Only as wide as the door was wide;
A frame as tall, or little more,
Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.
And we wondered, whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal, what the crime
That the Hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.
And innocent though we were, with dread,
We passed those eyes of buckshot lead --
Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he
For whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
And he gave us a riddle instead of reply:
"He who serves me best," said he,
"Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief
And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn
By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.
The next day's sun looked mildly down
On roof and street in our quiet town,
And stark and black in the morning air
Was the gallows-tree in the courthouse square.
And the Hangman stood at his usual stand
With the yellow hemp in his busy hand;
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike
And his air so knowing and business-like.
And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done
Yesterday, with the foreign one?"
Then we fell silent, and stood amazed,
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."
He laughed a laugh as he looked at us:
"Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss
To hang one man? That's a thing I do
To stretch a rope when the rope is new."
Then one cried "Murder!" and one cried "Shame!"
And into our midst the Hangman came
To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he,
"with him that was meant for the gallows-tree?"
And he laid his hand on that one's arm.
And we shrank back in quick alarm!
And we gave him way, and no one spoke
Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.
That night we saw with dread surprise
The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
The gallows-tree had taken root;
Now as wide, or a little more,
Than the steps that led to the courthouse door,
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
The third he took -- we had all heard tell --
Was a usurer, and an infidel.
"What," said the Hangman "have you to do
With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"
And we cried out, "Is this one he
Who has served you well and faithfully?"
The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows-beam."
The fourth man's dark, accusing song
Had scratched our comfort hard and long;
"And what concern," he gave us back.
"Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again,
"Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick," he said. "that we hangmen know
For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."
And so we ceased, and asked no more,
As the Hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night,
The gallows grew to monstrous height.
The wings of the scaffold opened wide
Till they covered the square from side to side;
And the monster cross-beam, looking down,
Cast its shadow across the town.
Then through the town the Hangman came,
Through the empty streets, and called my name --
And I looked at the gallows soaring tall,
And thought, "There is no one left at all
For hanging, and so he calls to me
To help pull down the gallows-tree."
So I went out with right good hope
To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.
He smiled at me as I came down
To the courthouse square through the silent town.
And supple and stretched in his busy hand
Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap,
And it sprang down with a ready snap --
And then with a smile of awful command
He laid his hand upon my hand.
"You tricked me. Hangman!," I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men...
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman. Foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I.
For I answered straight and I told you true --
The scaffold was raised for none but you.
For who has served me more faithfully
Then you with your coward's hope?" said he,
"And where are the others who might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the foreigner, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."
Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
None had stood so alone as I.
The Hangman noosed me, and no voice there
Cried "Stop!" for me in the empty square.

Maurice Ogden

Wednesday, 23 February 2011

Yerwot?

From comments here.

Being a democracy does not necessarily mean having some libertarian fascists in power all the time.

the people of Venezula chose their leader. And good luck to them, Chavez has inherited a typical, libertarian-conservative basket case
Steven Dobbs

"Libertarian fascists"? "Libertarian-conservative"? Is this cognitive dissonance or just being a bellend who uses "libertarian" as a term of abuse without understanding what it means?

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jimfryar 34p · 735 weeks ago

Angry, you are missing the point that 'libertarian' is the new really in, leftie swear word. It roughly equates to the old, 'fu**en.'

1 reply · active 735 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 735 weeks ago

Ah. So the latter then, like kids calling each other names without knowing what the words mean. What a prick.

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billsticker 51p · 735 weeks ago

Dobbsy is a complete syphilis ridden bell end as far as intellect is concerned. Quite frankly he's not worth engaging with.

1 reply · active 735 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 735 weeks ago

The thought had crossed my mind but then I read some more of his dribbling and decided not to bother.

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Tom · 735 weeks ago

Jim Fryer got there before me....

A Facebook "finker" wot has clicked over to the Telegraph - possibly as part of the undoubtedly organised trolling happening over there at the moment.

I note that the PITA barking fruitloop lefties of SWP are organising on line "campaigns"....

3 replies · active 735 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 735 weeks ago

Don't know why they feel the need to troll with some of the people hired there the last few years.

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Tom · 735 weeks ago

Hmm know what you mean, although any Louis Grey generally has negative comments that make me laugh out loud, and that isn't easy :-)

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Angry_Exile 90p · 735 weeks ago

Heh. And it was Louise and her buddy in greenery Geoff Lean that I was thinking of.

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billsticker 51p · 735 weeks ago

Apparently organisations like CACC and Climate Brief have lists they publish for their pet trolls to visit hate upon the filthy heretical 'deniers'. Apparently, sceptics need to be mobbed and shouted down for even saying "Er, hang on a minute. It doesn't work that way."

The thought occurs that if 'Climate Science' was any good they wouldn't have to indulge in these tactics. They're certainly well funded. Mostly by the EU.

1 reply · active 735 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 735 weeks ago

The comment trolls are just the latest move, and one which I wasn't really aware of. They've been playing the same kind of game for a good 15-20 or more years now. As you say, if their argument was any good they wouldn't need to do it, and the fact that they were doing it was what made me question the whole CAGW show to begin with. At one time I assumed they knew what they were talking about but I wondered why the need for the unofficial dirty tricks departments I began to pick. And having started picking I kept finding things they weren't being open about - why were they so quiet about the LIA and MWP, why was (and is) evidence that both were global phenomena ignored, why is the role of the sun assumed to be marginal when cycles track better with temperature than CO2 and it's an a priori conclusion that without its influence we don't have any climate at all, why the big push for ineffective stuff like Kyoto and no call for adaptation, and so on. I picked my way clean out of the warmist church and have been sceptical about everything, eco-related or otherwise, ever since.

I wonder how many other people they gradually lose that way. I also wonder if steadily losing such people removes any moderating influence on the dogmatists who remain.

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Katabasis · 735 weeks ago

Grrr - drives me up the wall.

Yep Dobbs seems to be ominpresent on UK broadsheet comment webpages, sprouting exactly that kind of rubbish.

Also what makes my blood completely boil is Monbiot continually claiming that the floods of "trolls" invading his threads are organised, paid resistance from the fossil fuel lobby and/or bots. His cluelessness is second only to his hypocrisy - as Bill Sticker mentions above, CACC have a dog-whistle mailing list for rapid rebuttal teams to attack sceptic sites. Monbiot is the honorary president of this organisation.
My recent post Gaddafi Duck

1 reply · active 735 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 735 weeks ago

Typical. Anyone leaving contrarian comments for the Moonbat is a Big Oil troll, but nobody who leaves a foam flecked and internally inconsistent rant bagging sceptics is ever doing it for Big Eco, eh? It's the green tinted spectacles wot does it. And the green tinted brain.

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will · 735 weeks ago

wow. literally throwing around words of without any awareness of meaning. it goes without saying he's stuck in the childish tribal red team blue team paradigm where he takes conservative, fascist, and libertarian to be more than even inaccurate synonyms but exact substitutes for corporatist authoritarian.
the fact that it is entirely possible to have a small c conservative socialist (im imagining a homophobic miner) is lost on him. the fact that fascism is and always will be a phenomenon of the Left and that it may well be impossible for an individualist ideology such as libertarianism to ever be reconciled with a rigidly collectivist ideology like fascism are equally wasted on dobbs. fascism goes beyond collectivism to outright anti-individualism. i got this book for chrimbo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Fascism and it explains alot about the lefty lot.
he's probably not even open to the suggestion that libertarianism has alot more to offer 'the poor' and 'diverse' than leftism ever has.
absolutely mad
i think i remember him spouting drivel on the one and only msm blog i checked - dan hannan. there were some pretty sharp commenters there who ususally ran dobbs in circles and had him defending stalin!

1 reply · active 735 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 735 weeks ago

Apologies, will. This fell into the moderation queue for some reason and I can't see why. Anyhow, yeah, that sounds like it to me. I suspect a rather binary worldview which says that if we're not with him then we're one of Them, and when we say that in fact we're something else and explain what we are and what it means his response is simply to add what we are to the set of all things which are Them.

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