The Fine Line Between Wheely Bins and Tyranny (Huh!)

In my July 20th post I looked at a Mail story and the subsequent editorial comment on a council survey done on the refuse of 10'000 households in varying demographic areas, to see who and what is recycled/recycling and chucked/chucking, and where it is being done. (NOT specifically logging waste to individual houses, which is downplayed) The piece has been spun into a preposterous tale of Stasi councils rifling through the spied on and reviled Middle England's dustbins to dig dirt on them. Any legitimate issues with the councils behaviour and spending are tossed aside in a hugely exaggerated story. And that, in my opinion was the real point of the non stories hyper coverage. That this kind of thing is designed to simultaneously piss off the target audience it is intended for, and to paradoxically play to some of their egos. We all have our bins emptied, and have recycling ones, so the story could have potentially affected you. But this conspiracy against Middle England really only exists in the editorials of overzealous Mail / Express articles. Perhaps on some level it is comforting for the sort of bombastic person who would get irked about this tale to feel that they are considered dangerous rebels who must be slapped down (presumably tyranny by recycling.), and that the powers that be lie awake at night worrying about them. These are the sort of people who write those staggeringly pompous; love notes to their own smug profundity, "Straight to the point" letters to the Mail. I actually feel sorry for these people, they are so lacking in self awareness and perspective that they probably never realise that the editors of the letters page will be laughing themselves stupid at the authors of them as they quickly composite them on, and that is not because they are any good. Better to think you matter a lot, than realise you matter quite a little in the great scheme of things. Dacre knows this and that is why we get articles like: Are the race Stasi rifling through your bin, by Leo McKinstry, who pulls no punches in knitting together right wing memes on just about everything from Marxism, to race, to PC, to apartheid, to stealing bills, to communism. It's pure Mail propaganda of linking the most arbitrary things to bizarre conclusions, and turning the hyperbole squarely up to eleven. Check this out.

"Emptying the bins used to be a straightforward municipal task, perhaps the most basic but universally valuable job carried out by local councils.

But thanks to the malign culture of political correctness, which has swept through the public sector over the past two decades, refuse collection has been transformed into a weapon of ideological bullying.

In the hands of the commissars who have come to predominate in British official life, the bin service is now used as an instrument not just for enforcing the fashionable green agenda, but also for encouraging an authoritarian mix of state intrusion and race-fixated social engineering.
Putting out our rubbish is becoming like something out of George Orwell’s epic novel 1984, where all the private activities of British citizens were ruthlessly monitored to ensure compliance with the state’s dogma."

That ticks every fucking box!

"Hidden cameras have also been deployed by some councils to spy on what people are throwing away."

Bollocks.

"Are they going to send any financial information they find to HM Revenue and Customs? Will they examine private letters for any potentially homophobic or racist content?"

Nope

"When Sir William Macpherson, the chairman of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, notoriously urged in 1999 that racially prejudiced remarks, even within the privacy of the family home, should be prosecuted, the proposal was condemned as paving the way for the introduction of Orwellian ‘thought crimes’ into our society.

Now the bin snoopers could have made this a reality.Such a fear is not nearly as outlandish as it might seem."

Oh come of it Leo.

"It is absurd that this destructive approach should be extended to bin collections. If the commissars are going to act on the information they clandestinely acquire, then the only result can be more racial divisions, more pointless labelling of people by race, more irrelevant campaigns and more suspicions among neighbours."

Huh?

The other half of this ridiculous article focuses on the councils obsession with race, even though it's only a broad demographic study into refuse trends. Anyway many people are interested in demographic habits. TV likes to chase the youth market, and the "urban" market (aka; Black people), they all aren't into cultural engineering McKinstry lays into the usual right wing spiel about cultural Marxism, and white guilt, and pandering to minorities, cultural engineering -the usual. None of which has any relevance to the article it spawned from. He concludes with this:

"We should all unite, black and white, to throw out this ludicrous, Big Brother intervention in our lives, and demand that councils do what we pay them to do: empty our bins weekly."

It's not just that fact that stuff like this is used ostensibly to high handedly condemn "dodgy practices", but is really just indulging egos. It is that this stuff always elicits a lot of righteous emotion for such low grade causes. Why not expend collective energy on a really worthwhile objective? Something a bit more noble than bloody bins.