Tuesday 4 May 2021

A Culture-War Manifesto

Online "lists" - 10 things you ought to know about ... - are generally just so much clickbait cack.  

But here's one you'll want to read 25 Things Everyone Used to Understand.  Sample: 

[2] Who and what you are is only partly self-determined. And it’s not the larger part.

[3] How you are characterized, spoken about, and identified by others is not generally up to you.

[15] Offense, insult, and hurt feelings are not particularly important, other than to oneself and to one’s intimates. This does not mean that you should go out of your way to offend others but rather that if you are offended, you shouldn’t be surprised if those outside your friends-and-family circle aren’t inclined to make a federal case out of it.

[16] You don’t accost random strangers on the street and unload your personal meshugas on them, because it’s not their business and they don’t give a damn. Nothing about these reasons fails to apply when you replace ‘street’ with ‘internet’.

[17] Scores of millions of people, most of whom neither know nor live near one another, cannot constitute a “community.”

Good stuff, huh?

ND


26 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sort of related, article title

"Boris Johnson’s Lies Don’t Harm Him Because the Political System Is More Corrupt Than He Is"

Put me down as Strongly Agree.

Anonymous said...

"Because once people sensed that the system was corrupt, they became cynical. And once they were cynical, once they believed the system was rigged whoever won, they began voting cynically too.

This should be the main context for understanding Johnson’s continuing success and his invulnerability to criticism. In a rigged system, voters prefer an honestly dishonest politician – one who revels in the cynicism of the system and is open about exploiting it – over one who pretends he is playing fair, one who feigns a belief in the system’s ultimate decency, one who lies by claiming he can pursue the common good.

If the system is rigged, who is really more mendacious: Johnson, who plays dirty in a dirty system, or Starmer, who pretends he can clean up the Westminster cesspit when all he will really do is push the ordure out of view.

Johnson is transparently looking out for his mates and donors. Starmer is looking out for a rotten system, one that he intends to makeover so its corruption is less visible, less open to scrutiny.

Liberals are mystified by this reading of politics. They, after all, are emotionally invested in a supposedly meritocratic system from which they personally benefited for so long. They would rather believe the lie that a good political system is being corrupted by rotten politicians and a stupid electorate than the reality that a corrupt political system is being exploited by those best placed to navigate its corrupt ways."

dearieme said...

Is a meshuga a Tommy gun?

dearieme said...

"You can’t always get what you want or deserve."

There is too much idle chatter about "deserve". Only God knows your just deserts and He doesn't exist.

Anonymous said...

If we all got what we deserved there'd be a lot of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Anonymous said...

dearieme - the Meshuga was a home made weapon used by the Irgun in 1940s Palestine, a rough copy of the British Steyn Mk III ;-)

E-K said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
E-K said...

Dominic Raab tells us we'll "... be as close to normal as possible, there will be some masks and social distancing" Err.... so not close to normal at all then.

And Liz Truss, so I hear, refused to deny that the Government is now going for Zero Covid.

... sorry to digress. I'm going to refuse to wear a mask after my second jab, even if I have to retire.

------

That was an excellent link but too much like common sense to appear anywhere influential (not that this site isn't, no offence.)

I had my first Political Correction course last week and it was truly sinister. You cannot be anything other than guilty. Thanks Theresa May !

Elby the Beserk said...

Today programme might take heed of this...

[17] Scores of millions of people, most of whom neither know nor live near one another, cannot constitute a “community.”

Jan said...

Anon@1.35pm

Agreed 100%

For EK: I've been round Tescos 4 or 5 times now sans mask and no-one has stopped me (so far. Mind you I don't hang about. So far no-one else has joined me and a considerable proportion of the population are wearing them outside when its blowing a gale (all virus will be easily dispersed) and/or there's no-one else anywhere near them. I despair....

Don Cox said...

I put a mask on when I enter the supermarket, and take it off when I leave.

It's their territory, so they can apply whatever rules they want. If the rules are too tiresome, people can shop else where.

But I think masks will gradually disappear over the next few months. They may return if there's a serious wave of new infections in the Autumn, perhaps based on a new mutation of the virus.

So far, we've got off lightly, with a very low death rate. This one will be a good rehearsal for any more serious plague with a higher death rate such as some variety of Ebola.

Don Cox

Elby the Beserk said...

"Unknown said...
I put a mask on when I enter the supermarket, and take it off when I leave.

It's their territory, so they can apply whatever rules they want. If the rules are too tiresome, people can shop else where."

Nope. Nobody and no institution has the right to make you wear or use a medical advice, assuming you are of sound mind.

Sackerson said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
E-K said...

Masks interfere with human interaction. They really mess it up.

And still we have no legal or medical definition as to what a mask can be - which shows what a load of bollocks it is.

Anonymous said...

ND - Trump was almost certainly right about the China Virus. Lots of interesting stuff therein, especially on how the virologists, who are all doing similar dangerous work (and some of them funding Wuhan) closed ranks.

The author was the long-time NYT science correspondent

https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038

And Dom predicted it all in 2019!

https://dominiccummings.com/2019/03/04/the-most-secure-bio-labs-routinely-make-errors-that-could-cause-a-global-pandemic-are-about-to-re-start-experiments-on-pathogens-engineered-to-make-them-mammalian-airborne-transmissible/

lilith said...

Stepson has just stopped wearing a mask. He wore one for a while but caught covid anyway. Now when questioned (on buses, in shops) he just says "I don't need one" and hasn't had any trouble so far.

Elby the Beserk said...

@anon 10:56am

Leak by far the most likely reason.


https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/bulletin-atomic-scientists-opens-wuhan-virus-pandoras-box

Dense article, but well worth a read as it examines closely all the possible reasons for the Covid-19 epidemic.

Nick Drew said...

Superb article, thanks Elby

the prostitution of academia is awful

Suff said...

Back to the culture war and it is a war. Well while the media are concentrating on rainbow flags, quietly in the background our last pillar of western democracy is toppled. Property rights and the rule of law. On con woman yesterday .can’t find it today but if you google “ The XR verdict that paves the way for anarchy”
So XR criminals defend their vandalism in court and are released not because they were proven innocent but because they were doing it for a just cause.
Judge Gregory Perrins directed jurors that even if they thought the protesters were ‘morally justified’ it did not provide them with a lawful excuse to commit criminal damage. He said: ‘They don’t have any defence in law for the charges they face,’ and cautioned the jury: ‘I have given you clear direction on what the law is and your duty to apply that law to the facts as you find them to be. These are not empty words.’

However they did indeed prove to be empty words because after deliberating for just over seven hours, the jury cleared the defendants of all charges. This is not trivial. Criminal vandals sought to put themselves above the law and succeeded. The judge was made a fool of.

This sets a very dangerous precedent. What next BLM burning people out of their houses because they view them as white supremasists?

E-K said...

I've yet to read Elby's article but my money's on a lab cleaner selling used bats to the wet market to make a bit of money on the side.

I think his name was Ho Lee Fook, or something similar. That was what he said when put under caution by local police at the outset of the outbreak anyway.

GridBot said...

Simply Excellent EK.

I'm sure you've just won internet comment of the day!

Anonymous said...

suff - juries returning perverse verdicts is not a new thing in the history of UK political protest, though it may be new in the context of openly committed vandalism.

But ... we have had a Tory admin for several years now, and the green indoctrination - whether in schools, colleges, TV, radio, social media - shows no signs of abating. At the same time Tory local authorities are approving unprecedented house building on green fields all over the UK, destroying wildlife and trees - partly because they think Whitehall will overrule them if they refuse and developers appeal.

It's no good indoctrinating people into a religion then expecting them not to act on it.

Anonymous said...

The Guardian comments this morning are doubling down on the "white working class people are thick racists" theme after Hartlepool.

Again, this is an age/education thing. Those of us who grew up and were educated pre-1990s tended to see people like miners and steelworkers as good guys, salt of the earth working folk. There are no miners and precious few steelworkers now, and people brought up on UK history as the long story of white racism are just following what they've been taught.

dearieme said...

"tended to see people like miners and steelworkers as good guys"

But then if you talked to my father's generation they knew the miners as the bastards who went on strike during The War. And during the Great War. And the dockers too.

Anyway, Ha-Ha-Ha-Hartlepool.

Elby the Beserk said...

Nick ...

and the medical profession sadly as well

https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/a-doctors-plea-to-doctors-remember-the-hippocratic-oath/

"The story of ivermectin has highlighted that we are at a remarkable juncture in medical history, where rigorous scientific evidence, our training and experience, the tools that we use to heal and our connection with our patients, are being systematically undermined by relentless disinformation stemming from corporate greed.

The story of ivermectin shows that we as the public have misplaced our trust in the authorities and have underestimated the extent to which money and power corrupts. Had ivermectin been employed in 2020 when medical colleagues around the world first alerted the authorities to its efficacy, millions of lives could have been saved and the pandemic, with all of the associated suffering and loss, brought to a rapid and timely end."

E-K said...

Gridbot - I'm going to have to pull out the comedic stops to make a comeback on this site, methinks.