Please explain how pushing any of these is socialism. Please provide a workable definition of socialism as well.
The Nethlands wanted to kick 3300 farmers off their land and convert the land into ‘agricultural innovation centers’. They want nitrogen fertilizer reduced by a third, and cattle herds culled by a third. This is very much a WEF program. Matk Rutte, ex prime minister, is a WEF leader and co-authored the WEF’s fertilizer reduction plans.
The Netherlands practices high intensity farming, which is why it is the EU’s second largest food producer despite having a tiny percentage of the farmland. The WEF apparently thinks their higher use of nitrogen fertilizer has nothing to do with that, or they are trying to force a reduction in the traditional food supply, perhaps to force people into more planet-friendly alternatives.
So instead of massive cuts to EU food production, the voters kicked Rutte to the curb.
Farmers across the EU are now rising up against this nonsense.
And they want to do this globally. Trudeau, another WEF leader, already announced that Western Canadian farmers have to do the same. We told him to go stick it.
What’s bizarre to me is the idea that the WEF’s overriding reason for engaging in such activities as improving health care for the underserved and providing affordable housing, is because it wants to prop up capitalism.
By that logic, progressives in general should stop trying to alleviate such problems and make people’s lives better, since that only delays the inevitable overthrow of the System. 
Pair that line of thought with the one that claims acting on a global basis is intrinsically wrong/evil, and it feels like we’ve entered a time warp and are back in the 1930s or earlier.
Numbers vary on the total, but it’s around 3000. 3300 was mentioned in another article.
WEF press release on partnering with The Netherlands on Food Innovation Hubs
Not exactly
now, is it?
No, but they don’t realize that. They just assume that “World” means globalist and that globalist means that it’s for the benefit of developing countries at the expense of developed ones. Even though it’s not necessarily that way, that’s how they perceive it.
The WEF is generally more along the lines of pushing adoption of technologies and practices that are beneficial regardless of a country’s wealth, from what I can tell.
That’s wholly based on your perspective. If you’re looking at it from one perspective, it’s the government playing hardball with polluters, but from the other, it’s a heavy-handed government forcing farmers off their farms.
That’s what makes a lot of this stuff so touchy; neither side is necessarily wrong. To use a hypothetical, what if the peak polluters are farmers who can’t afford to innovate, and are making do with their parents’ 1970s equipment and practices? Should they be forced off their land because they’re relatively poor? I would argue that’s hardly the progressive ideal, even if there is pollution involved. But nor should the government just be forced to tolerate that pollution either. And to make it triply complicated, why should some urban people in Utrecht be forced to foot a large part of the bill for it? They’re not farmers, they don’t owe those farmers anything, but they do benefit from less pollution.
Situations like that can much more complicated than they look at first glance.
I see the WEF as “technocratic capitalists”. They see problems like pollution and poverty, and propose solutions through capitalist means with minimal (but still some) government intervention.
This contrasts with “doctrinal capitalists” who just deny these problems exist, or at least deny that trying to solve them ever does any good. To them, even talking about taking specific actions to reduce poverty or pollution is “socialist”, no matter what those actions are.
They are more fascist than capitalist. They are happy to let capitalists make lots of money, so long as they adhere to the dictatates of the WEF and other NGOs. They host conferences on digital currencies where they salivate over ‘micro-control’ of people’s buying decisions, such as giving them a monthly CO2 cap on their products. So, more social control than economics. That’s not capitalism. It’s at best techno-authoritarianism.
My beef with them is not so much the specifics of the policies (although some are completely daft) but their attempt to develop GLOBAL solutions. There are no global solutions. It’s a complex world. What works for one region will not work for another. And globalists have no hope of understanding the comlexities og the things they are trying to overturn or modify.
A simple example: Quebec has 80% hydro resources. Alberta has 5%. A renewable energy policy that works for Quebec will NOT work for Alberta. And that’s just two regions within one country.
The Netherlands uses more fertilizer per acre than other countries. But the Netherlands also produces huge amounts of food for the world, from a small amount of farmland. You can’t have one without the other.
The environmentalists claim that the Netherlands can produce just as much food with less fertilizer. I call bullshit. Fertilizer is very expensive. No one uses more than they have to. This is more about pushing people away from beef (mandatory herd cullings) by raising its price by restricting supply, and using the power of government to drive farmers off their land so the state can put it to ‘higher value’ use.
There is another reason why global solutions are bad. They introduce a common mode error for all of humanity. Complex adaptive systems evolve in clusters with borders between them, because they operate in a stochastic world, and a mistake can wipe out a cluster. We built the internet the same way, to make it antifragile. Animals evolve the same way, which is why continents don’t have ‘super packs’ of predators, herbivores don’t congregate into one giant herd, etc.
Borders are critical to thriving, for diversity, and to isolate mistakes. The WEF wants to smash them down, and that’s a very bad mistake. Individual countries fail all the time, but they get lifted back up by the existence of a robust global economy they can still take part in. Make one super global government, and when it makes a fatal mistake there won’t be anyone left to save us.
I’m guessing the conservative people that are saying the world economic forum is pushing socialism views must mean climate change, environmental policies, LGBT or political wokenism as I don’t hear the world economic forum is pushing say state run factories or state run sectors or a strong welfare state.
I see it’s been mainly covered, but I came in to say that the reason why people say the World Economic Forum is pushing socialist views is:
- many people are stupid and/or twist the facts to fit an incorrect political narrative
and
- Many people are stupid and think “socialism” means “things I don’t like”
No, but they are okay with the state controlling the movements of people, their buying choices, what they can drive, what drugs they must take, what they can read or watch, what they can eat…
Call it techno-authoritarianism. Or Chinese Style state capitalism. That’s what the WEF wants. The smart people of the world running the lives of everyone else for their own good.
Possibly the ‘socialist’ worry comes from Klaus Schwab himself (founder of the WEF), who is quoted as saying “In the future you will have no privacy, and no property. And you will like it!”
More fascist is their push for ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and ‘ESG’ - both of which are now failing badly because they were always a bad idea.
There’s also an element of transhumanism in the WEF. They talk about life extension, the wonders of implantable chips in the body, yada yada. I have no problem with explorations into these areas, but they cross the line by talking about implementing this stuff globally.
One of the weird things about the WEF that hurts them is that it’s a strange amalgam of a UN-style government planning activities combined with TED-style talks by anyone willing to pony up the money to speak. So a serious conference on climate legislation is followed by a wild talk about embedding chips in people to track their Co2 or something, and people put them together as one proposal and it makes the serious stuff sound crazy too.
But there’s plenty of crazy even from the ‘serious’ people.
I take heart in the WEFs trajectory. Their themes in the past years were “The Great Reset”, followed by “Build Back Better”, followed by “The Great Narrative” (convincing people we need to reset and build back better), and to this year’s “Rebuilding Trust” (We tried to get them to do what we want and they hate us. Manipulating the narrative didn’t work. Now what?")
If you thought the WEF was meaningless and has no power, go look at how many world leaders repeated the “Build back Better” slogan while selling the public on whatever spending programs they wanted…
That’s a misunderstanding (I assume) of the issue in the Netherlands. The problem is not that farmers want to use that much fertilizer to raise crop yields, but that pig shit is disposed of by spreading it on the fields. It’s waste disposal rather than fertilizer use. Big Pork had long been polluting groundwater with nitrates, and the air with ammonia, and its political influence had let the Dutch government let it slide (necessitating a lot of expense in conditioning drinking water). After a recent court case the Dutch government has at long last taken on Big Pork.
There is much the same conflict in the German state of Lower Saxony between the state government and pig farmers (pig population in the Netherlands: 11 million; in Lower Saxony: 8 million)
This makes sense. Sadly I feel they are moving us into an electronic dictatorship.
Indeed. I for one am fucking sick and tired of subsidizing big corporations who get away with not paying for negative externalities such as polluting water systems, and offloading the costs onto the public.
And when the are called on it, and regulations put in place to make them account for these externalities, they cry and whine and use their useful idiots to mischaracterize what is actually going on.
What is actually going on is that we are not going to subsidize their pollution any longer. Cries of “oh they are going to shut down the poor little farmer” are simply a bullshit cover screen for their continued slurping at the trough of subsidies.
Are you sure this isn’t you passing along false information (again)?
One “little” issue we have is Global Warming, as I said, nature (or thermometers) don’t care about the feelings of farmers (in this case) that did not care that the poorest ones would have compensation as it was reported.
A simple example that the governments are taking account for already, and it is not news that they will not do the same. This point here is very inane.
I already quoted Scientific American in a different thread, stop ignoring cites. (from the early cite:)
With fertilizers, we face a kind of Goldilocks problem. Some places have too few nutrients and therefore poor crop production, whereas others have too much, leading to pollution. Almost no one uses fertilizers “just right.” Our analysis shows hotspots on the planet—particularly in China, northern India, the central U.S. and western Europe—where farmers could substantially reduce fertilizer use with little or no impact on food production. Amazingly, only 10 percent of the world’s cropland generates 30 to 40 percent of agriculture’s fertilizer pollution.
Among the actions that can fix this excess are policy and economic incentives, such as payments to farmers for watershed stewardship and protection, for reducing excessive fertilizer use, for improving manure management (especially manure storage, so that less runs off into the watershed during a storm), for capturing excess nutrients through recycling, and for instituting other conservation practices
In all fairness, he’s not exactly wrong, is he? People willingly give up all their personal information online in the interest of convenience. Many people are eschewing ownership of property like houses or cars, preferring to rent or use ride-shares to avoid the cost and upkeep of ownership.
Like anything else, I would avoid taking a trend and extrapolating it to EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE.
Ran across this gem in Mike Rothschild*'s “Jewish Space Lasers”:
*Mike says he’s not one of those Rothschilds. But what do we really know? 
