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“racist or sexist increasing in usage between 2010 and 2019 by 638% and 403% in The New York Times or 514% and 141% respectively in The Washington Post....The usage of words denoting racism, homophobia, transphobia or sexism were at or near, up to [2014], all-time highs. These results suggest that the trend of increasing prevalence of prejudice related words in media discourse precedes the political emergence of Donald Trump — although Trump’s presidency and subsequent reactions to it may have exacerbated these trends.”
I learnt this from Ed West in Unherd who says:
"The paper, like Zach Goldberg’s work in similar areas, points to a seismic shift in American liberal opinion from about 2013, a change in worldview almost without precedent; even during the 1960s and 70s public opinion changed quite slowly in western countries, and in Britain the basic premises of the sexual revolution weren’t accepted by the majority until well into the 1990s.Exactly - status anxiety - being modern thinking means you are well educated and well travelled. You have class.
"This is a form of runaway progressivism, driven by status anxiety, and it is usually attributed to social media and the iPhone, which encourages clickbait and dopamine-producing culture war content."
"...Part of the cultural imbalance between Left and Right is due to the fact that the mind of the former is effectively vaccinated against conservative ideas; once anything has a prejudice word attached to it, the mind’s ideological immune system is able to dismiss it; it recognises it as something dangerous and malign, and probably Nazi, before shutting it down. It’s why conservatives so frequently respond to bad progressive arguments by insisting that their idea is actually the more racist or sexist — lib-owning which only confirms the oppositions’ basic premises. Conservatives, in contrast, have few terms with which to disarm opposing ideas, and you can’t the battle of ideas when your opponents literally write the dictionary."I couldn't agree more. Nothing is sillier than using anti-racism to defeat anti-racists, though admittedly it works, or did when Jeremy Corbyn was trounced.
Conservatives should believe in freedom, tradition, hierarchy and inequality, the latter two being the corollaries of the first two.
Until they do the left will win, whatever party is in power.
Exactly as the left did in 1980s Britain despite Margaret Thatcher.
The centre-right is now fascist thanks to the ever-changing bounds of political acceptability both in the USA and in Brussels. This means that by not changing and by holding onto widely-acceptable positions from only a few years ago, Orban and Fidesz are targets of the ire of liberal elites on two continents. Never mind that he and his party are consistently re-elected and reflect what the electorate wants. That definition of democracy is now outdated.
ReplyDeleteNiccolo Soldo
"…in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade."
Marx, in an 1848 speech ‘On the Question of Free Trade’
To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me. The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
How much better the world would be had Marx and Lenin never lived. We'd have been spared Nazism and Italian Fascism as well as Communism. Why do people treat Marx with respect and treat racist thinkers like his contemporary Gobineau and HS Chamberlain, if they know of them, with horror and lots of health warnings around their ideas? Their ideas are comparably bonkers.
ReplyDeleteHow great a man Solzhenitsyn was and how sad that he is much less known now than before his death.
Orban is said to be very corrupt as I am sure are his opponents in the ex-Communist party, but yes Mr Soldo is probably right.
I just Googled Niccolo Soldo and found this on Foucault, extreme promiscuity and the origins of AIDS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHxILdN-PRQ
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