Love Brendan O’Neill. This article is nothing short of a straight home run against Moonbeam George Monbiot, a columnist in the Guardian with whom we’ve taken much issue in the past on this very blog (john-wright.net search term ‘Monbiot‘). By analyzing Monbiot’s past, we understand his present, and it’s quite an amusing picture. Excerpts:

“Not many moons ago, Monbiot was looked upon by many people as a green-ink eccentric, who was probably given a newspaper column on the same basis that friends of the Marquis de Sade smuggled scraps of paper and pots of ink into his cell in the Charenton insane asylum: because if he’s kept busy writing, he won’t go utterly off his nut.”

“Like a latter-day Christian recluse, he wrote of his horror at hearing the sound of human laughter. ‘The world is dying, and people are killing themselves with laughter’, he wailed (3). So disturbed was he by the ‘gales of laughter’ sweeping Britain that he was moved to quote Kierkegaard: ‘This is the way I think the world will end – with general giggling by all the witty heads, who think it is a joke.’”

“The metamorphosis of Monbiot is telling. It shows, in microcosm (after all, we’re only talking about the Guardian comment pages here), how the politics and science of environmentalism have added a new, legitimising coating to elite fears and prejudices. The most striking thing about the rise and rise (and rise) of the environmentalist ethos is how it has acted as a life support machine for the political and cultural elite’s contempt for the lifestyles of the lower orders, and how it has added a new scientific/end of the world twist to the authorities’ attempts to manage, control and change our behaviour and expectations.”

See the rest of this great piece here.