This tirade caught my eye.
I sympathise with the writer. He needed a better editor (one who didn’t give him such an awful headline), and isn’t really a patch on Clarkson when it comes to writing over-reactionary prose. But there are numerous choice sentences:
If we recreate the Dark Ages in the 21st century, it will be our own doing, too. Nobody is making us. None of our Evil Empires came from outer space. The red cancer of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism may have gone into remission, but the malignancy of tyranny comes in many colours.
I’m uncertain whether to file this under humour, modern life or politics. Much of what he says is overblown. And yet, there is a serious point in what he writes. Somewhere.
The blog that pointed me to this column thought that his his point was this:
Increasingly people use the arbitrary “good of society” as a justification to remove more and more rights from others.
Actually, this is an old, old problem. For some of the very best essays on the subject, read Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty, by Isiah Berlin, especially the one on Rousseau.
The people he writes about did not aim at tyranny, but the good of all. Sobering stuff.