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smokingbootOh I have truly had enough of it, this endless fecking nonsense.
There's nothing new about the hateful rubbish being spewed, it's just that this time's favourite flavour bad guy is Muslim, where once it was black, or Irish, or gypsy, or communist or anybody, anybody different enough to be a target. I remember being that kind of target when I was a kid for being part Scottish part Spanish.
This morning an old colleague from the studio put a horrendous piece of trash up on his feed about sharia law overtaking our secular laws. I am just fed the feck up with this, if you ask any of these 'British patriots' exactly where this is happening, they have no answer.I believe people have the right to their own opinions but not their own facts; that's not how reality works. I told him I was unfollowing him and giving myself time to work out whether it was worth staying friends. He responded by unfriending, a relief, I suspect, to both of us.
But I cannot believe that this cr*p is everywhere, that everything learned is forgotten. This stuff is simply the same piss poor rubbish it always was, and in a country that seems obsessed with reliving its past every twenty minutes, I just can't get how this wretched 1930s style tosh has gained any traction here.
Not quite true. I have some clues. A hideous combination of entitlement, resentment, poverty and lack of education, all of them mingling with deliberately fed misinformation for decades. A good friend and man of sensitivity told me about how he had no problems with immigrants (I believe him, a genuine most excellent chum) but he couldn't forgive the EU for the dumping of cheap Chinese steel and its consequences for the Welsh steel industry. He looked genuinely aghast when I told him that the EU had tried to bring in regulations that would have stopped the dumping but some other member countries, led by the UK, resisted successfully. He didn't know.
Why didn't you know? I wanted to bellow. I'm not expecting people to check everything but, dear god, this mattered to you and your family, why didn't you find out?
Answer: he heard somewhere. From someone he trusted. Of course he did. They all heard something somewhere from someone they trusted, whether it's the implementation of sharia law in some borough no-one can ever quite name, or the iniquities of a trading bloc for not over-riding a member government determined to beggar its citizens in the name of laissez faire.
There will always be arguments to be had over trade, but we were all supposed to be past this fatuous crap about how the Other is Bad precisely because they are Other. I swear to god, there are people in this country who won't be happy until three miles up the road is a far away place, and the only person worth marrying is a blood relative.
Time to breathe. To remember that I spent today in good company, relatives who smile and are kind, whom some of my countrymen would like to deport, as once they would have liked to deport my family and me. Doesn't matter. Today I was in the company of a happy baby, an aunt who insisted on feeding me too well, a cousin-in-law full of spark and ideas. Today we are happy.
But also today, I can't take any more nonsense, and will not humour it.
*Funny in the way that nobody's laughing.
There's nothing new about the hateful rubbish being spewed, it's just that this time's favourite flavour bad guy is Muslim, where once it was black, or Irish, or gypsy, or communist or anybody, anybody different enough to be a target. I remember being that kind of target when I was a kid for being part Scottish part Spanish.
This morning an old colleague from the studio put a horrendous piece of trash up on his feed about sharia law overtaking our secular laws. I am just fed the feck up with this, if you ask any of these 'British patriots' exactly where this is happening, they have no answer.I believe people have the right to their own opinions but not their own facts; that's not how reality works. I told him I was unfollowing him and giving myself time to work out whether it was worth staying friends. He responded by unfriending, a relief, I suspect, to both of us.
But I cannot believe that this cr*p is everywhere, that everything learned is forgotten. This stuff is simply the same piss poor rubbish it always was, and in a country that seems obsessed with reliving its past every twenty minutes, I just can't get how this wretched 1930s style tosh has gained any traction here.
Not quite true. I have some clues. A hideous combination of entitlement, resentment, poverty and lack of education, all of them mingling with deliberately fed misinformation for decades. A good friend and man of sensitivity told me about how he had no problems with immigrants (I believe him, a genuine most excellent chum) but he couldn't forgive the EU for the dumping of cheap Chinese steel and its consequences for the Welsh steel industry. He looked genuinely aghast when I told him that the EU had tried to bring in regulations that would have stopped the dumping but some other member countries, led by the UK, resisted successfully. He didn't know.
Why didn't you know? I wanted to bellow. I'm not expecting people to check everything but, dear god, this mattered to you and your family, why didn't you find out?
Answer: he heard somewhere. From someone he trusted. Of course he did. They all heard something somewhere from someone they trusted, whether it's the implementation of sharia law in some borough no-one can ever quite name, or the iniquities of a trading bloc for not over-riding a member government determined to beggar its citizens in the name of laissez faire.
There will always be arguments to be had over trade, but we were all supposed to be past this fatuous crap about how the Other is Bad precisely because they are Other. I swear to god, there are people in this country who won't be happy until three miles up the road is a far away place, and the only person worth marrying is a blood relative.
Time to breathe. To remember that I spent today in good company, relatives who smile and are kind, whom some of my countrymen would like to deport, as once they would have liked to deport my family and me. Doesn't matter. Today I was in the company of a happy baby, an aunt who insisted on feeding me too well, a cousin-in-law full of spark and ideas. Today we are happy.
But also today, I can't take any more nonsense, and will not humour it.
*Funny in the way that nobody's laughing.
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no subject
Date: 2018-08-28 09:00 pm (UTC)I hear you.
Honestly? As I'm sure I've said to you before—I bore everyone I can with this theory—history is a pendulum swing between neopositivism and fundamentalism, and we're swinging now toward fundamentalism. It'll get worse before it gets better.
no subject
Date: 2018-08-30 02:06 pm (UTC)The trouble with neopositivism is that people are attached to their experiences, even the ones that don't make sense; Empirical evidence is too cold for many, they can't/won't apply it to themselves or their lives. They believe what they want to believe. But the pendulum does swing for sure - in the 90s, people wanted to believe in good times. Now they don't. Did Austerity grab the pendulum and push it back the other way? What was the turning point, and when/what is the next one?
no subject
Date: 2018-08-30 02:18 pm (UTC)Climate change produced a horrific draught in the middle East that killed agriculture and led to political instability. Political instability led to a mass exodus. Refugees flocked to places that had no social support systems in place to receive them and integrate them.
Etcetera.
no subject
Date: 2018-08-30 04:25 pm (UTC)It may be that this is just another wave that passes, I hope so. After all, we were all scared and weird in the 80s weren't we?
no subject
Date: 2018-08-30 04:35 pm (UTC)The incoming generation generally rebels against the fundamentalisms of its parent generation.
One of the things that makes this cycle so taut in the States right now is that the incoming generation (Millennials) are basically a class of indentured servants because they have all these college loans at hideously high interest rates to pay off. They're not rebelling. That's why it was so great to see those Parkland high school students speaking out.
no subject
Date: 2018-09-01 08:47 am (UTC)In Britain right now Baby Boomers are seen as main culprits in the Brexit debacle, a cossetted bunch who, after benefiting from a full working NHS, welfare state, university grants, full final pensions, right to buy etc, seem to have turned tory for tax cuts. I've heard them described as 'The People Who Ate Their Children.' Generations X and Y seem to get away with being barmy, irresponsible and mostly drunk. Millenials are the new custodians of moral compass, but they have very little power and look likely to be poor, indebted with added climate change.
Still, despite occasional priggishness - and a weird unconscious tendency towards the enforcement of Goodthink - they seem like decent sorts, unwilling to start wars or destroy the planet.
no subject
Date: 2018-09-01 02:13 pm (UTC)I must say, it makes me hostile and prone to saying nasty things about the Younger Generation! :-) If I ate my children, I want to say, they're giving me bad heartburn. :-)
no subject
Date: 2018-09-03 06:51 am (UTC)Right now, I think there are some pretty unhealthy attitudes across the political spectrum in the UK. It is an angry place...
no subject
Date: 2018-09-03 12:44 pm (UTC)I was born in 1952. That's just seven years after World War II ended. Seven years!
And yet WWII was not a part of the dialogue while I was growing up at all. Mentioned, but not mentioned as something that was relevant in any way to the present tense.
All most Boomers knew growing up is that the generation that had come before them was terribly secretive about something, and terribly repressed, and terribly devoted to the amenities of a deeply boring and confining lifestyle.
And so, we rebelled.
It was different in the UK, I imagine, where you had the physical evidence of WWII to contend with in the form of a bombed out London, and—of course— since the U.S. did not forgive the war debt, you had years of rationing and privitation. Rationing didn't stop till 1954 or so.
But you listen to the culture heroes of the 60s—John Lennon, for example—and they're cheeky and dismissive about the war generation. The rallying cry was We want to have a good time!
And, to a large degree, we did.
no subject
Date: 2018-09-05 01:32 pm (UTC)World War II was a kind of mass hypnosis event here, with the hypnotist dying before ending the session. World War I was such an unmitigated shock it could not be propagandised easily into a glorious victory. But World War II became instead a moment of peak Britishness, and the problem with having a 'finest hour,' is that every hour after can't compare. Then came the 60s, that moment of rebellion and innovation, and then...
But yes, those of us who could brush off the cobwebs had a great time!