Priggishness and Piety.

luka

Well-known member
A lot of this about at the moment. The alt right capitalises on people's natural distaste for priggishness and piety, moral hypocrisy and bad faith.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
That odd thing of it suddenly becoming very important to one subset of US leftists to be allowed to say "retard".

I admit, nothing hits the spot for me in terms of expressing contempt for some rule, system or inanimate object quite like calling it "fucking retarded". But there are reasons not to, and I can't pretend I don't know what those are.
 

luka

Well-known member
dissensus, mercifully, has been free of it, for the most part. Probably because most of us are so old. But i remember thirdforms telling us he'd been banned twice from 5555555555555555 for behaving like a human being and not a plaster saint.
 
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poetix

we murder to dissect
I got told recently by someone in a twitter spat to go away, reflect, and try to be a better person. I cannot imagine anyone responding to such an invitation with anything other than "fuck you, asshole".
 

luka

Well-known member
I feel like this stuff was in the air when I was a child. I don't know for sure, but if I think how people dressed and so on.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Remember someone lecturing Owen in the comments section of some blog that was having a go at him about how we all have blind spots due to privilege and fuck up some times, the important thing was not to be defensive but to own your mistakes etc, and him just being "fuck offfffff", and rightly so.
 

luka

Well-known member
I feel like this stuff was in the air when I was a child. I don't know for sure, but if I think how people dressed and so on.

I live by goldsmiths and work by Tate modern and I see Young People with haircuts and clothes that remind me of the social workers and activists and legal aid lawyers my parents were friends with in the '80s. The Puritan aesthetic. Shaved heads. Sackcloth and ashes. Pursed lips.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
That particular type of sanctimony has been a plague for a few years now, it's the fact that those employing it feign unawareness of how fucking annoying it actually is, and disavow their own real intent which is to bait people into telling them to go fuck themselves, so that they can then be exhibited as intemperate, unreflective, easily riled etc.

It's a particularly ugly racket.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Ah, the way cartoonists would always depict leftists, as these emphatically unadorned people, any actual adornments actually only there as a surface for political messaging - CND-symbol earrings - nothing dandyish except maybe the scarf that says, without being anything as vulgar as an actual Oxford scarf, that you probably went to Oxford.
 

luka

Well-known member
We grew up in the aftermath. The reaction. Loaded magazine. Tits. Beer. Wanking. This is who you really are. Embrace it you unregenerate oaf.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
A whole register of affectation. Flat vowels that weren't at all the vowels you grew up using. Deliberately docked and stunted language, the way people with less education than you were imagined to talk. Risk-free language, no hostages to fortune, nothing you could get pulled up on.Then in private the real attitudes come out, the disgust for the very people being condescended towards, the resentment at having to cram yourself into this little box in order to be seen as doing right by them.
 

luka

Well-known member
Beer in one one hand nob in the other looking at a picture of Jo Guest in her knickers. That was what we were sold. Different world.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
In the 90s we had the ladette, who was allowed to have bodily functions. Now she gets called the "cool girl", and is despised as a sell-out for wanting to be liked by men. Men, ugh.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I bought a copy of Loaded once, admitted it to my female friends who weren't disgusted as such (it was the 90s) but just treated it as if I'd straight up said "so, I bought some airbrushed pictures of Kate Beckinsale, to wank over".
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's the Internet, isn't it? Everyone has a voice, but also everyone has feelings, everyone is offensible and offended. The other side of this coin is 4chan, edgelords, alt right.

Also because it's the Internet the liberal PC stuff is also often an ego thing. A self righteous, mob mentality thing. I hate people who say "virtue signalling" as a general rule but virtue signalling definitely exists.
 

luka

Well-known member
The internet exacerbates it but my feeling is this climate existed in the '80s too.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Periods of political defeat and discouragement tend to lead to frustrated acting-out in other spheres. What happened in the late 90s was Blair, the general sense that at least the right side (if not the right side of the right side) was in charge. People stopped feeling quite so much as if they were in a war where the only available weapons and only accessible targets were in the domain of opinion and expression.
 
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