Elsewhere (161)
Via Thomas Pauli, Brendan O’Neill on post-election bewilderment:
The Twitterati — the time-rich, mostly left-leaning set, consisting of cultural entrepreneurs, commentators and other people who don’t work with their hands and can therefore tweet all day — were especially dumbfounded by the results. Boiled down, their pained cry was: “But everyone I know voted Labour.” […] The real Two Britains… is, on one side, the Britain of the moral clerisy, which is pro-EU, multicultural, anti-tabloid, politically correct and devoted to welfarism and paternalism… and, on the other side, the Britain of the rest of the us, of the masses, of those people increasingly viewed by the cultural elite as inscrutable, incomprehensible, and in need of nudging, social re-engineering and behaviour modification. […]
The more Labour comes to be occupied by influential but unrepresentative middle-class professionals, the more contemptuous it becomes of the Other Britain, the lesser Britain, the stupid Britain that won’t obediently vote Labour… We have seen this already in the few hours since the results started coming in: Neil Kinnock musing over the “self-delusion” of the electorate; Polly Toynbee, grand dame of knackered Labourism, speaking of the “mind-blowing ignorance” of some of the electorate, who are “weak readers” and don’t know what is in their best interests (which is Labour, obviously).
Ace of Spades takes a big lens to “microaggressions”:
Now I know it’s the Worst Thing Ever to try to find out if the person you’re speaking to is of Korean or Chinese, or Korean or Japanese, extraction, because, like, You Should Just Know Or Something. These questions are said to be “microaggressing” or “othering” or “exoticizing.” One could also call them a stranger taking an interest in you and your culture… Like most SJW microkvetches, this one is a bit incoherent, insisting, as it does, that Anglos should simultaneously take no interest in Asians’ heritage and also have perfect native-level fluency in cultural differences between Asian cohorts.
And Franklin Einspruch on the virtues of “cultural appropriation”:
Akira Kurosawa studied American pulp novels, and George Lucas studied Kurosawa. Elvis is unimaginable without black-gospel music, and Jimi Hendrix is unimaginable without Elvis. I could go on. Forever. Where does new culture come from? It is copied, with alterations, from existing culture. The process is reproductive. Sexy, even. So of course, the outrage-as-a-lifestyle wing of the progressive Left wants to dictate rules for its proper enjoyment.
Demanding constraints on such an ancient and universal process is like trying to turn the tides by yelling at them, but these particular scolds seem unaware of the folly. They have complained about straight women appropriating lesbian fashion, art students appropriating Native American dwellings, couture houses appropriating Native American garb and Latina hairstyles, a Canadian post-punk band appropriating the name “Viet Cong,” non-Asian pop singers looking too Japanese or too Hindu, and white models looking too black. […] As is the case in all examples of political correctness, it is an attempt at control masquerading as an appeal for justice.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.
Re Galloway: Couldn’t agree more.
Re Ed Miliband doing interview with Russell Brand:
Comment from someone on a Spectator blog a few days ago – apologies for not having noted down their name.
Just because he behaves like an idiot, consorts with idiots and treats us like idiots, doesn’t mean he’s an idiot himself. He may just define wisdom differently from us.
Absolutely David. And they get to feel so so lovely and self-righteous about themselves, simply by re-tweeting or re-posting something. What a fantastic drug.
‘[She] has so little respect for the former that she endorses the latter, including the moronic act of defacing a monument to WW2 heroines’.
Nancy Wake. Noor Inayat Khan. Krystyna Skarbek. Odette Churchill. Violette Szabo. Vera Lynn. And the names we do not know.
The WRAFs who manned the radar stations that got dive-bombed during the Battle of Britain.
The WRENs and the FANYs, and the searchlight teams.
The nurses in theatres of war across the world.
The workers who went into the factories while the men went to fight, both here and across the Atlantic Ocean.
The ARP wardens and the volunteer fire fighters.
The resisters who hid British aircrew from the Nazis and helped smuggle them home.
The fighters of the FFI, the AK, and (let’s give them credit that is their due) the Soviet and Balkan communist partisans.
The snipers and the ‘night witches’ of the Eastern Front.
See a bunch of crustie scum piss on your heroism. And see a moral midget called Laurie Penny cheer them on.
My grandmothers, mother and aunts.
yowzer, reading the tweets on the #toriesoutnow hashtag
and I thought Californian Progressives were nutz (and I live here)
Well, there’s nothing like insulting the old and the dead to make one’s point come across to everyone else. What a moron.
I think they do ugly things to gain attention. It’s an adult tantrum like a 3year old smashing things in a supermarket.
David, I have spent the last couple of days gorging on delicious schadenfreude. If I have another petit thin wafer of the stuff I may burst.
Comment is Free has produced mountains of fragrant salt:
Right now I feel that the people of this country can go hang, I mean who cares Owen?
Who fucking cares?
Have spent most of my life, decades, campaigning for a fairer country, for the working classes and the poor, and time and again the working classes and the poor vote Tory.
–BabylonianSheDevil03, bemoaning the ingratitude of the poor.
the stupid working class voted for the evil tories
–Geoffree, displaying that famed progressive nuance and tolerance
What we need it not to take anymore crap if that turns out to be all out strikes work to rule and riots on our streets then so be it
–Johnathan Timpany, though he himself will not be taking part in any rioting action, as he has a bad back
What remains of the British left is flat on its back, staring at the ceiling in a mess of unwashed sheets, and shouting at it to get up is not going to help right now.
–Laurie Penny, explaining that the British left is manky and lazy
There is no point. I’d say this country has gone to the dogs but it went years ago. I’m heartbroken here.
–charliechristian, staring at the ceiling in a mess of unwashed sheets
BBC radio 4 and BBC TV (excepting newsnight) seem to just churn out Tory press releases.
–youwillbe, on the nefarious right-wing running dog capitalists of the BBC
…and so on. Other recurring themes are that the evil right-wingers won through “fear” (apparently the progressive message was all hopey changey stuff and they never suggested the NHS would be “destroyed” if the bastard Tories got back in) and that Ed Miliband is a “decent” man.
Well, what are they basing that on?
Don’t get me wrong – I would trust Ed Miliband not to mug me in a dark alley. I’d be happy to have him as a neighbour, safe in the knowledge that he probably wouldn’t hold wild parties, blasting dubstep through the walls at 3 AM.
But then, I could say the same about any of the other political leaders. Except Natalie Bennett – she’d probably have a disgusting compost heap in her garden, attracting clouds of flies and hippies. She shouldn’t be allowed to live in a house with electricity and running water – make her live in a carbon neutral eco-yurt in a soggy field somewhere.
What makes Ed more “decent” than the rest of them? Was it his promise to jail people for “islamophobia”? His pledge to bring Venezuelan-style price controls to the UK? His determination to tax us more?
If by “decent”, we mean “believes he is on the side of good and righteousness”, then nearly everybody is decent. Including members of ISIS, headhunting cannibals, and Tony Blair.
Anyway, nice to see the rentamob left throwing their toys out of the pram in London. And – hashtags! Take THAT, democratically elected government of the United Kingdom!
Lucky lefty kids these days. When I was a nipper all we had was Ben Elton and Red Wedge. Astonishingly, jokes about “Fatcha” and the star power of Prefab Sprout proved insufficient to bring down a Conservative government. But perhaps Lily Allen’s semi-literate tweets and Russell Brand’s webby-cammy rants will inspire a new generation to man – er, person – the barricades.
STOP PRESS: Guardian article on election discovered that isn’t absolute insanity:
It could not because Labour’s leadership of former special advisers does not look like the people it wants to represent and does not look as if it likes the look of them either. In this, it is typical of the wider educated left in England, which almost alone in the world, makes a virtue of denigrating its own people.
The universities, left press, and the arts characterise the English middle-class as Mail-reading misers, who are sexist, racist and homophobic to boot. Meanwhile, they characterise the white working class as lardy Sun-reading slobs, who are, since you asked, also sexist, racist and homophobic. The national history is reduced to one long imperial crime, and the notion that the English are not such a bad bunch with many strong radical traditions worth preserving is rejected as risibly complacent. So tainted and untrustworthy are they that they must be told what they can say and how they should behave.
What truth there is in the caricature is lost amid the accompanying hypocrisy. The intellectual left deplores racism but uses “white” as an insult. It lambasts the sexism of the right, but stays silent as Labour candidates run meetings where Muslim women’s inferiority is confirmed by stewards who usher them into segregated seating .
Lost, too, is any notion of how to change a society. Countries are like individuals. They will take criticism from friends and family who have their best interests at heart. If opponents make the same criticisms for the same good reasons, however, they dismiss them as insults from people who only mean them harm.
If the left is going to come back, its first task is to show that, deplorable and stupid though we undoubtedly are, in so many different and disgraceful ways, it doesn’t actually think the English are its enemies.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/09/labour-left-miliband-hating-english
Steve:
Other recurring themes are that the evil right-wingers won through “fear” (apparently the progressive message was all hopey changey stuff and they never suggested the NHS would be “destroyed” if the bastard Tories got back in)
Interesting you should stay that, Steve. As it turns out, Labour’s election literature was the most negative of all the parties’, with UKIP being the least:
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/05/revealed-the-party-with-the-most-negative-election-campaign/
Livesey, incidentally, is to my knowledge the only moderator of a talk-show programme who has ever warned Laurie Penny to shut up and let the other panelists speak, and then to cut her mike off when she failed to comply.
Burnley, born & bred. We don’t take any prisoners, tha’ knows.
@abacab
Did not Jesus exhort Caesar to feed the poor?
Nope. Try reading the New Testament before asking silly questions.
Personally or collectively (the latter as the force of state, powered by the envy of the tyrannies of various quasi-elected majorities and official intellectual mobs, funded by coercion and levied force, and benevolent by whim of policy and pain of law?
Did not Jesus exhort that Caesar in order to feed the poor?
In other words, using that formulation Jesus was all into aggression, that despite a life led by the principle of acute non-aggression, a life cut short by not one but two institutions joined as one into a statist institution of religious lethal intolerance.
And contemporary progressivism is nothing if not religious.
Mr. X,
… it is typical of the wider educated left in England, which almost alone in the world, makes a virtue of denigrating its own people.
They do that in the US as well.
I believe, though I don’t know much about British politics, that Jesus wrote that slogan for Russell Brant: “Give your money to Caesar, Russell.” And then the wrong people were elected by the wrong people to do the wrong things.
On the subject of The Book, I suggest reading the ten commandments and then pointing out the rider that says “unless the government does it”.
yowzer, reading the tweets on the #toriesoutnow hashtag
Why yes, twitter does rather speak for itself . . . .
Uh oh, racist insults person of ethnicity! http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_28077798/q-linkedins-itamar-orgad-helping-students-land-job?source=infinite
DAMMIT, wrong link!!! http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_28074484/ruben-navarrette-halperin-interview-ted-cruz-was-painful?source=infinite
In this, it is typical of the wider educated left in England, which… makes a virtue of denigrating its own people… So tainted and untrustworthy are they that they must be told what they can say and how they should behave.
I doubt Nick Cohen will be much thanked for his honesty. And of course we’ve been here before.
Surely the “Bueller…bueller….bueller” was a hint that my statement was a rhetorical question, since of course any fule no that Jesus did not at any point exhort Caeser to feed the poor, nor to tax the money changers at exorbitant rates…
I doubt Nick Cohen will be much thanked for his honesty.
No. He won’t be.
He never has been when he’s dared to point out uncomfortable truths to his own side.
If they listened to him they might actually learn some things that would help them to achieve their goals.
Instead, he’ll be dismissed, ridiculed, or denounced.
And they’ll go on doing the same thing. And then be
“baffled” that people seem not to want to conform to the script.
Right, I’m off to take my mother-in-law out for brunch. Play nicely. And wish me luck.
i’m not a member anymore, but i bet the ‘political’ forums on http://www.outeverywhere.com/ are in meltdown over this election result, lol…i used to love taking the piss on there when i was a member, got banned in the end.
‘I doubt Nick Cohen will be much thanked for his honesty’.
He won’t be. Any more than David Aaronovitch, or Andrew Anthony, or anyone else who pointed out long ago that the British left was disappearing up its own arsehole.
It’s also worth noting that Cohen writes for the ‘Observer’, which is (a) a more sober publication than the ‘Graun’ and (b) the neglected step-child of the Guardian Media Group.
Meanwhile, over at CiF, Owen Jones is getting a bit of a kicking in the comments.
Many thanks to our gracious host for featuring my first effort at The Federalist.
On Liam Byrne’s infamous “I’m afraid there is no money” letter.
Laurie Penny is now tweeting that ‘My grandmother got the George Cross in WW2’. Thankfully someone’s done the research here, so I don’t have to.
Marta Penny was in Malta during the war, and King George VI awarded the island’s inhabitants the George Cross in April 1942 for their valour in withstanding the Axis siege (and for holding the only bit of Allied territory to survive between the Straits of Gibraltar and the Egyptian border). So whilst it is accurate to say that Penny Snr ‘got the George Cross’, the implication that she was somehow specifically awarded this (like, say, Violette Szabo or Noor Inayat Khan) is massively inaccurate. To put it mildly.
You are invited to consider for yourself whether Penny is actually a liar and a fantasist, or too stupid to actually understand her grandmother’s case.
A friend of mine once said that the voters in Britain, when the stubby pencil in their hand hovers over the box marked ‘Labour’ they usually pause, say “No way” and put their mark in the one marked ‘Conservative’ because, deep down, the people are conservative at heart.
You are invited to consider for yourself whether Penny is actually a liar and a fantasist, or too stupid to actually understand her grandmother’s case.
You are being generous to her.
I would have ticked X for all of the above options
BWAHAHA
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/10/traumatised-by-the-election-result-a-psychotherapists-recovery-guide
Oh, ac…that. Is. Awesome.
That’s money, right there. Perhaps when Phillipa figures out how to do so AND teach this to your lefties, she can come over here to the U.S. and do the same. Hell…if she really can pull this off, I’ll pay for the flight and she can stay at my house.
In Laurie’s world, “Not defacing a war memorial” equates to “being cowed“.
No, me neither.
I love this from the comments about the “TRAUMA!!!!!!!”
“Tories got gay marriage through. And what precisely is good about that? Equality? Oh yes being being able to enact an institution that has subordinated women and grants the state a say in the validity and control of my relationship. No thank you. It is a Tory con.”
‘They didn’t make it compulsory you know.’
Excuse Me, Are You A Shitlord?
http://politicalwave.org/2015/05/04/excuse-me-are-you-a-shitlord/
“There is no point. I’d say this country has gone to the dogs but it went years ago. I’m heartbroken here.
–charliechristian, staring at the ceiling in a mess of unwashed sheets”
@Steve2
Ah you fool! You idiot! You’ll have given them the idea. The damn thing will be a short (ok very very short) one act play, put on at the Tate. Variously experimental art, or experimental drama (apply to 2 grants, doncha know). Or maybe even “transgressive” art if charlie wants to play it in the nude and includes the big (doesn’t he wish) reveal.
You are so screwed! Heritage will suck it up!
I think the thing that’s most touchingly bonkers about the garment-rending and ululating over at the Graun is the extent to which they think an outright Conservative majority will change things. It’s going to be widders ‘n’ orphans out on the streets, and mill bosses bein’ ‘orrible crool, oh lawks yes Sir, whereas anyone who’s been paying attention will know the compass needle is not going to shift by as much as a few degrees off due Social Democracy. Much as I would like some of the more histrionic predictions of Penny Dreadful etc. to eventuate (her nightmares sound like my wish list) it ain’t gonna happen. We might get a slight headcount reduction in Quangolandia and a bit of deckchair shuffling with public spending but that’s about it.
In rhetoric, “fear” is just a derogatory term for “rationality”. Anyway, I got your elsewhere right here, buddy.
Christopher Snowdon on pre-election fantasies:
I suppose part of their problem is, lefties would rather talk to each other, competitively signalling their virtue, rather than talk to the electorate, which, all too often, they seem to disdain, if not openly despise. As the Guardian’s Philppa Perry put it, “hating the electorate for being stupid.”
The one thing that always bemuses me about the left is their binary view on everything.
If you voted Conservative or UKIP you must agree with everyone of their policies and therefore are evil. The left is always talking about “Nuance” but they refuse to accept that there is nuance in voting. You cannot cherry pick policies when you vote, or should I say when a non-leftist votes, you have to vote for a party and all their policies good or bad, so whomever you vote for is a balancing act. You try to weigh your policy priorities and preferences against those of each party and then vote for the best of a bad bunch. There may be policies with the party that you vote for that you dislike but you take the good, or should I say least worse, with the bad.
The left however will defend any policy their side advocates regardless. So principles such as free speech will be abandoned if they conflict with some other agenda. It is a “whatever it takes” attitude to get into power that overides any principle. They then assume that the other side must feel the same way so get incredibly confused when someone on the right backs principle over the party line.
I suppose part of their problem is, lefties would rather talk to each other, competitively signalling their virtue, rather than talk to the electorate …
The one thing that always bemuses me about the left is their binary view on everything.
Will the right honourable MP Emily Thornberry please step forward:
Mrs Thornberry, who lives in a £3 million home in Islington, North London, told The Telegraph said that she thought that the image was “remarkable” because she had never seen a house “completely covered in flags before”.
That should have been the first pre-election clue for them, really.
That should have been the first pre-election clue for them, really.
Quite, and it’s part of a wider pattern, practically a reflex. Remember Gordon Brown and “that bigoted woman,” i.e., pensioner Gillian Duffy, who dared to mention immigration as a cause of concern, and whom Brown, still on-mic, dismissed as contemptible, saying that it was “ridiculous” that he should even have to be near her. The Guardian is a reliable supply of such disdain for the lower orders, who are typically viewed as something to be fixed, as is much of the left’s cultural, or pseudo-cultural, output. (Today Paul Mason, the economics editor of Channel 4 News and whose mind still lingers in the student union bar, tells us, “I do not want to be English… one man’s Englishness is another’s racism.”)
I’ve mentioned before an episode of Radio 4’s satirical revue Loose Ends, in which the Unfunny Leftist Comedian Of The Week was very much amused by the taboos surrounding immigration and multiculturalism. The tone was triumphal and the gist of his punch line was “Isn’t it hilarious that people who have concerns about immigration and assimilation now have to be quiet because otherwise they’ll be called racists. Ha! We won!” This was deemed incredibly funny. And note the assumed “we”. And yet many of the same comedians gasp in horror and bewilderment when the people they disdain look to other parties to address their concerns.
After the election results on 8th May
The Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee
Had leaflets distributed across King’s Place
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the British left.
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts.
Would it not be easier
In that case for the Guardianistas
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
With apologies to Bertold Brecht.
Paddy Ashdown:
“Polls helped Tories by magnifying fear factor.”
The polls were neck and neck. Why couldn’t they have helped Labour and the Lib Dems?
Logic?
Brian Micklethwait on the ‘politics of fear’ argument.
‘Brian Micklethwait on the ‘politics of fear’ argument’.
So when Labour was telling us to vote for them or the NHS would be destroyed, they were giving us a positive message based on hope?
Stephen Fry gushes over Russell Brand, as it were.
The one thing that always bemuses me about the left is their binary view on everything.
Exactly- see Laurie Penny’s tweet “No, what’s disgusting is that some people are more worried about a war memorial than the destruction of the welfare state”.
Typical of how the Left thinks and reacts- “If not (a), then (b)”. That’s it- no middle ground, no compromise.*
Whereas in the real world it is perfectly possible to be concerned about the defacement of a war memorial and simultaneously hope that the government can administer a fair and just welfare system. Caring about one does not automatically disqualify one from being able to express an opinion about the other, unless you’re a shrill and shouty Marxoid harpy.
*When the Left do try to effect a compromise, they get it horribly wrong because it inevitably involves two irreconcilable and mutually antagonistic positions, so they end up with, for example, a Labour party rally attended by senior party figures, with a largely Muslim audience segregated by sex and with said senior party figures too cowardly to speak out.
‘Whereas in the real world it is perfectly possible to be concerned about the defacement of a war memorial and simultaneously hope that the government can administer a fair and just welfare system. Caring about one does not automatically disqualify one from being able to express an opinion about the other, unless you’re a shrill and shouty Marxoid harpy’.
This.