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The rich people telling A-level students "don't worry about your grades, just stand on your own two feet" would starve to death if they were left alone in a house with a well-stocked kitchen.
This is what they mean by "standing on your own two feet"
It was the constant theme of Tory MPs in the 1980s and 1990s: people had to "live in the real world" and "pull themselves up by their bootstraps".
Yet half of them had never been outside a quadrangle:
Eton>Oxbridge>the Bar>Parliament
As a rule, the bigger the golden pedestal on which rich people were born, the more they instruct poorer people to be self-reliant.
monbiot.com/2011/11/07/the…
And let's not forget this little episode. From a man who lives on his wife's estate, that takes £150,000 in state benefits (farm subsidies)
theguardian.com/politics/2013/…
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George Monbiot
@GeorgeMonbiot
Unless there is a major shift in dietary trends, by 2050 global farmland will need to expand by 31%.
That means ecological devastation.
Interestingly and disturbingly, almost all of it will be extra pasture, not extra arable:
This highlights the urgent need to move away from an animal-based diet.
Source: journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…
Yet we are constantly being told by food writers that we should switch TOWARDS pasture-fed meat.
Because it requires a greater land area per kg of food than any other form of food production, it is uniquely damaging to wildlife and habitats.
Read 8 tweets
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George Monbiot
@GeorgeMonbiot
Corruption now runs through this country like a stick of rock.

vice.com/en_us/article/…
The government has used the pandemic to give vast amounts of money to corporations, partly through a scarcely-monitored bailout, partly through lucrative contracts for PPE to unqualified companies.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Meanwhile, in the midst of this corporate welfare splurge, parents can scarcely afford to feed their kids, public services are stumbling and the state's capacity is cut to the bone.
Read 10 tweets
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George Monbiot
@GeorgeMonbiot
The way we think is the way we exist.
Yet, though we rightly emphasise the importance of learning, of experience, of acquiring skills and building relationships, we talk very little about the importance of thinking.
As a result, we are in danger of stumbling blindly through life, absorbing other people's ideas and using other people's words, but not thinking it through for ourselves. This makes us easy to manipulate and easy to deceive.
We talk a lot about autonomy, independence and freedom. But these values are meaningless unless we think our own thoughts.
Of course we are products of our societies and cannot exist alone, But independent thinking is also crucial to our humanity.
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