UK EU Referendum Aftermath

vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Similar in the sense that they agree that it exists, what its basic tenets are, and that it's the dominant way of understanding the world, while still disagreeing on what's good and bad about it.
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
I love that episode of Friends when Hitchens is exposed as demented fantasist by Chandler.

 
luka

luka

Well-known member
lol ive never watched that before. you can really see the schoolboy in him, in fact he still seems to be a schoolboy there, a particular type of schoolboy.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
luka said:
This is his theme nowadays. Ubiquitous Liberalism. Surely you're familiar with it by now! He's been beating that drum for ages.
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Yes, I know - but he said "socially progressive", not "liberal". There's a difference. (Isn't there?)
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
i dont know how you choose to define socially progressive but i think its maybe more fruitful to know what vimothy means by it, and to appreicate his broader point, and then pick holes in that, if you choose to, rather than trip over an ambiguous phrase?
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
i suppose im most interested in what kind of a world vimothy might like to see, what social mores it might have, what form of political organisation. im familiar with where he thinks we are, but not where hed like to see us heading.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
luka said:
i dont know how you choose to define socially progressive but i think its maybe more fruitful to know what vimothy means by it, and to appreicate his broader point, and then pick holes in that, if you choose to, rather than trip over an ambiguous phrase?
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But it's not an ambiguous phrase - not to me, at least. It describes policies intended to reduce the general structural unfairness of life. (I know the standard rejoinder to this is "Equality will always be a chimera because all humans are not created equal", which might hold some water if our society was anything close to a meritocracy, which it evidently is not. Anyway, you'd have to be a proper starry-eyed idealist to think inequality could ever be eradicated totally - the progressive aim is to reduce the aspects of inequality that in principle can be reduced.)

And certainly in socioeconomic terms, the UK has been getting more unequal for last 40-odd years.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Even if you take "progressive" as synonymous with "liberal", we've had a succession of governments that have introduced unambiguously illiberal laws. The Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 describes a list of permitted drugs, and states that any psychoactive substance not on that list is illegal by default. Think about that for a moment. Isn't it kind of a step change in the philosophy of law to have a list things you are allowed to do, rather than banned from doing? And that's one of god knows how many pieces of unarguably illiberal, even authoritarian legislation.
 
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luka

luka

Well-known member
yes, although by some other measures theres been a movement in the opposite direction. william burroughs and eric hobsbawn, to give two examples, both felt that to some extent, that the left had acheived its aims and that was the main reason it had become somewhat toothless. not to say some of those gains havent been rolled back over the years but....
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
The gains of the right in the economic sphere - rollback of welfare state, privatisation, increase in rights, reach and power of corporations etc (basically the victory of capitalism, Thatcher/Regan and Neo-Liberalism) - squeezed most traditional left wing platforms and policies straight out of the Overton window, or at least the ones that offer a genuine chance of improving people's lives, Blair and the New humanitarianism did the same for the last vestiges of left wing foreign policy, diplomacy, disarmament, multilateralism, internationalism, UN as effective actor etc.

So what youre left with is social liberalism, shorn of any ideological framework and tradition, floating, isolated in a sea of neo-liberalism. There is no 'convergence' in the sense of left and right both arriving at these policies at the same time, rather, the right has taken the only policies of the left they can stomach (as they are 'soft' and offer no challenge to prevailing economic/market/military policies) and offered them as panacea to long suffering constituents, and the 'left' are fighting the same battle in order to disguise their own ideological bankruptcy and betrayal of their fundamental ideals.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Mr. Tea said:
Yes, I know - but he said "socially progressive", not "liberal". There's a difference. (Isn't there?)
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I just mean that social policy (as opposed to economic policy, which is a different matter) is broadly progressive or liberal (in the philosophical or political science sense). If you reset the dial fifty years, you get a society which was extremely conservative by today's standards (even if it was pretty liberal for its day). If you reset the dial further, the effect becomes even stronger.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Almost half of the adults in 12 European countries now hold anti-immigrant, nationalist views, according to major new research that reveals the spread of fringe political views into the mainstream.

BuzzFeed News has been given exclusive access to new data from YouGov, which polled more than 12,000 people across the continent to measure the extent of what it termed “authoritarian populist” opinions – a combination of anti-immigration sentiments, strong foreign policy views, and opposition to human rights laws, EU institutions, and European integration policies...

In Britain, the poll found authoritarian populist attitudes were shared by 48% of adults, despite less than 20% of the population identifying itself as right-wing...

In France, a clear majority of people surveyed – 63% – held authoritarian populist views, while in Italy the figure was 47%. In Germany, it was 18%, which appears low by comparison but, given the country’s history and the extreme nature of its far-right groups, is regarded by analysts as surprisingly high.

The highest levels of authoritarian populist views were recorded in Romania and Poland, where they were held by 82% and 78% of adults respectively.
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https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertonar...term=.dvGOlzb8bW&ref=mobile_share#.kjypbxlWld
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
“The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings.” - Anton Chekhov
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
The average train nerd has always looked to Europe for inspiration. The luxury of the Trans Siberian, the folly of the Arlberg Line, the extravagance of the Bernina Express...
 
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