Why the Latest Pro-Rationing Study is Really Good News
Another day, another academic study/tabloid headline/cringily earnest editorial normalising the idea of rationing.
The powers-that-shoudn’t-be LOVE rationing. They would die to start rationing everything for everyone (except themselves, naturally).
For years now, barely a few months can go by without some academic or institution penning a pro-rationing editorial or publishing some study about the benefits of “a limited choice environment on pro-climate consumption patterns”.
…I made that particular sentence up, but it could easily be real.
In March 2020, practically the moment the fake “pandemic” began, establishment voices were all abuzz about rationing.
During the food riots of 2022, Iran instituted food rationing linked to biometric IDs.
In Italy in 2022/3, Operation Thermostat was a form of “pro-peace” quasi-energy rationing.
In February 2023, an academic study from the “inter-disciplinary applied ethics centre” at Leeds University argued that:
…rationing has been neglected as a policy option for mitigating climate change [and] that rationing could help states reduce emissions rapidly and fairly.
The most recent example claims:
Is THIS the key to tackling climate change? Almost 40% of the public would agree to World War II-style RATIONING of meat and fuel to slash carbon emissions, survey reveals
That’s a Daily Mail headline reporting the result of a large-scale survey conducted by the “Climate Change Leadership Group” at Uppsala University.
You can read the full study in Nature or a summary on phys.org.
As you can see, I used the term “large scale survey” loosely. The survey polled people in only five countries – US. Brazil, Germany, India and South Africa. It surveyed ~1700 people from each for a grand total of 8654 people.
That would be ~0.0004% of those country’s combined population of 2.1 billion. Or roughly one millionth of the population of the world. Hardly a sample size to draw anything meaningful from.
…that’s even supposing we can rely on impartial climate change-related research from something called the “Climate Change Leadership Group” in the first place.
But if we give the survey the benefit of the doubt and assume it does have any kind of value as a set of data, it’s actually not a bad result.
Let’s see the silver lining here.
The climate change psy-op has been in place for decades, an endless narrative machine spewing out propaganda with monotonous regularity. Rationing, more specifically and more recently, has likewise been the subject of positive messaging all over the news/media and in academic circles.
So, the good people of the “Climate Change Leadership Group” took 8654 of the most propagandised people to ever exist and surveyed them. We know how surveys work, they’re not just questions and answers, they are codified to try and produce the answers the surveyors want to get.
But anyway, surveys completed, these researchers took the resulting data and analysed it. And when I say analysed, I mean manipulated. We know how these systems work, they massaged the numbers, more than massaged them. They oiled those numbers up and gave them the business.
In short, it is more than safe to assume that this number is as big as they could possibly make it.
And what did they end up with?
Almost 40%.
That’s it.
You know what that means? That means over 60% of people would not support rationing.
And it’s not just rationing either, the survey asked about rationing and taxation of food and fuel individually,
and if you look at the study’s results graph you can see not one single surveyed measure got over 50% support in even a single country:
Neither taxation nor rationing received majority support anywhere.
That’s despite years of exposure to propaganda and billions spent on social conditioning, neither of which appears to have worked.
A potential win for the human race. Or the 0.0001% of it they surveyed, at least.
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Rationing has always been normal in the real world.
it called being poor.
going shopping men’t looking at the cheaper food prices and working out what can be brought and not.
Heating was rationed.
using the phone was rationed.
loads and loads of problems with these surveys, they do an awful job of predicting election results, they are based on squishy assumptions about demographic representativeness, and of course the wording of questions asked strongly biases the responses received
I wonder if this label “WWII style” was included in the text presented to the poll participants, or was it added by the author reporting the results?
the memory of the Second World War is regularly trotted out as an instrument of manipulation, ever more cynically and unscrupulously now that almost no one who lived through that war remains alive still
it provides a convenient template for facile moralizing about the battle between absolute good and absolute evil in a way that peace activists and critical thinkers of past generations, who were not reluctant to call bs on this narrative, abhorred
in our city during the virus hysteria a mural appeared depicting the 1940s American propaganda icon “Rosie the Riveter”, but this updated version has her wearing a mask over her nose and mouth and proudly displaying the site on her arm where she received her government-sponsored injection
yes, those were the golden days of patriotism, when everyone cheerfully played their parts as cogs in the glorious military machine and kept the factories humming so there’d be no shortage of firebombs to drop on Tokyo and Hamburg!
but even beyond this issue of framing, you have to be skeptical in general of the idea that it matters what the majority believes
there will always beyond any doubt be many issues about which the majority is simply wrong, due to indoctrination, mass-media brainwashing, simple old-fashioned prejudice, intellectual laziness, ethical bankruptcy, etc
we should not be using any measures of popular acceptance, in the final analysis, to justify our convictions about what is right
There’s always Soylent Green – no shortages, no rationing there,
and, would go well with little billy gates vat-goop ‘meat’ – a hearty
meal for the proles. (Better than Winston Smith’s ‘cabbage for
breakfast, cabbage for dinner, and cabbage for tea.’ And there’s
Monty’s ‘spam’ – plenty of ‘spam’ – “‘spam’ with everything’… No
rationing there.
Here is YouTube farmer Harry Metcalf explaining the dramatic drop in UK food production over the last few years. Down by two thirds on his farm between 2021 and 2025.
Countryside stewardship scheme.
https://youtu.be/xJCrfujVZIk?t=777