The Culture War

[Murphy]

I worry this sort of thing's happening on a greater scale than we realise. There must be plenty of smaller organisations without the visibility of the National Trust where these people are trying to force their way in.

The National Trust, an anomaly of amoral language in itself, are one of the biggest enablers of Britain’s archaic land, privacy and access laws. Worked alongside their staff before life change and they were a significant contributing factor. The levels of ingratiating bs are Jedi, encouraging a priest class who wear crumpled, blue-faience linen jackets, shoes highly polished or scuffed to fuck bohemian wannabe

Trolling such an organisation, inside or out, still suggests NT had it coming for decades. One of the least diverse, pearl-clutching cysts these islands has produced, milquetoast ejuts with PhD’s in Country Piles and museum studies, creative with trousers and cardigans

 

[sus]

56 Percent of Young People Think Humanity Is Doomed

A major study of 10,000 young people across 10 different countries lays bare the scale of climate crisis-related anxiety felt around the world.

www.vice.com

 

[thirdform]

56 Percent of Young People Think Humanity Is Doomed

A major study of 10,000 young people across 10 different countries lays bare the scale of climate crisis-related anxiety felt around the world.

www.vice.com

Is this anything new? It is how abrahamic religions for instance started. Apocalyptic thinking will always have a pull when one hits their limits of rationalisation/mental processing power. We all, to one extent or another, feel the pull.

Though I'd argue that of course the climate catastrophe gives young people a lot more reasons to be pessimistic in an objective sense.

 

[thirdform]

I think I've said this before, but I keep feeling like these people are doing a 2+2=5 thing at the moment, like they're constantly blasting people with deliberately inconsistent positions as some sort of brainwashing technique. Free speech is important, you can't just ban opinions that you don't like hearing, oh but please don't talk about slavery and colonial genocide because that's upsetting.

Liberalism: all ideology and no organisation.

 

[version]

The National Trust, an anomaly of amoral language in itself, are one of the biggest enablers of Britain’s archaic land, privacy and access laws. Worked alongside their staff before life change and they were a significant contributing factor. The levels of ingratiating bs are Jedi, encouraging a priest class who wear crumpled, blue-faience linen jackets, shoes highly polished or scuffed to fuck bohemian wannabe

Trolling such an organisation, inside or out, still suggests NT had it coming for decades. One of the least diverse, pearl-clutching cysts these islands has produced, milquetoast ejuts with PhD’s in Country Piles and museum studies, creative with trousers and cardigans

Yeah, but are people like this really the people we want "trolling" them?

Members of the charity have also expressed particular concern about RT’s endorsement of Stephen Green, the leader of a Christian fundamentalist lobby group, for one of six vacant positions on the trust’s governing council.

Green, who accuses the NT leadership of being “obsessed with LGBT issues”, has lobbied against the criminalisation of marital rape and defended overseas laws proposing the execution of some gay people.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Yeah, but are people like this really the people we want "trolling" them?

Members of the charity have also expressed particular concern about RT’s endorsement of Stephen Green, the leader of a Christian fundamentalist lobby group, for one of six vacant positions on the trust’s governing council.

Green, who accuses the NT leadership of being “obsessed with LGBT issues”, has lobbied against the criminalisation of marital rape and defended overseas laws proposing the execution of some gay people.

Is this RT as in Russia Today?

 

[version]

Is this RT as in Russia Today?

It's some group called Restore Trust who are being promoted and funded by "anti-woke" and "climate-sceptic" right wingers.

 

[Mr. Tea]

It's some group called Restore Trust who are being promoted and funded by "anti-woke" and "climate-sceptic" right wingers.

Dig deep enough and it will probably turn out my guess was right.

 

[Murphy]

@version No but it’s a cruel world where it’s always open season on someone. Would only expect tokenwoke gestures from the NT in the face of right wing gimps piling on and pilling the organisation

That’s the irony, it drives doubling down on pc posturing which is hard for one of the whitest, class-driven establishment bastions of Britain. If NT had its house in order it couldn’t be held up as hypocritical from so many different angles, even the ones we find repellent

What Restore Trust want is amplification of its signal, nothing more. They operate at an even more parasitical level. They wouldn’t know what to do with success because such a thing will never happen in the heritage sector - it’s too embedded in Ivory-towered self-interest and nepotism to actually be infiltrated. Trust me, I tried

 

[version]

The Conservatives are going in pretty hard on this at the moment Leo. There has been similar stuff at the BBC and museums generally have been warned off removing problematic statues. Here is a local example:

Government demands Museum of the Home keeps racist statue against wishes of the community

After several weeks of confusion and outrage, the reasons for the Museum of the Home retaining its memorial to slave trader Robert Geffrye against the wishes of the community are becoming clearer. …

hackneyhistory.wordpress.com

The new proposed policing bill also includes increased prison sentences for people who vandalise statues.

Also the govt’s own commission on racism has recommended that teaching about our colonial past must include the “good” bits. For balance.

Another one,

Tory donor John Booth appointed chair of National Gallery

Appointment will alarm those who accuse Boris Johnson’s government of stacking cultural institutions with supporters

www.theguardian.com

 

[Murphy]

They should all be in lorries, hooded, heading out into a forest late at night, nostrils full of the smell of rotting leaves and urine

 

[Murphy]

Ok, not all, but most

 

[sus]

Is this anything new? It is how abrahamic religions for instance started. Apocalyptic thinking will always have a pull when one hits their limits of rationalisation/mental processing power. We all, to one extent or another, feel the pull.

Though I'd argue that of course the climate catastrophe gives young people a lot more reasons to be pessimistic in an objective sense.

It's not, and I think you bring up a good point.

My interest here is: When NYT readers think that COVID hospitalization rates are 20x higher than they actually are—when 56% of young people believe that humanity is doomed b/c of climate change, when not a single scientific forecast includes an extinction event—well, it seems like liberal propaganda is (1) real (2) working.

And although it's been said a thousand times, it's still important to remind ourselves that inflated risk assessment ("we're in unprecedented danger") is exactly how authoritarianism is justified & flourishes. Post-9/11 hysteria is our best example, with its laughable rhetoric of how "every American is under threat," give me a fuckin break, 9/11 is a historical non-event and terrorists were never a real threat. And now we have vaguely authoritarian rhetoric being pushed by the left to confront the climate crisis + COVID. Which, look, it's not crazy behavior to say "we gotta give up some things to survive," like wearing masks indoors. But when it's questionable whether "survival" is actually at stake—when the danger is inflated by orders of magnitude—well, you're giving up liberties, morals for.... very little. It's just a bad trade.

But, like you say, there may also be a deep human desire to believe in apocalypse, and we can't fault media, political parties, etc—this is just people peopling, nothing to see, move along.

 

[sus]

You see this rhetoric on the right constantly, of course; the 9/11 example was a conservative-led push, although WAY too many Dems jumped on that boat unthinkingly—basically all of them, if I recall.

But right now the majority of it is coming from the left. Sure, pockets of Evangelicals believe crazy things about eschatology, but I'm not really worried that the American government is gonna take drastic measures to ward off Beelzebub.

 

[version]

" ... a style of carceral fanaticism—a making over of everyday life into the image of perpetual security crisis—is no less a signature of the thing we call neoliberalism than are manic privatization, oligarchic dominion, and the total absorption of public life into market imperatives."

 

[Leo]

When NYT readers think that COVID hospitalization rates are 20x higher than they actually are

I'm not familiar with this one, can you explain? thanks.

also, check out the two articles I posted in the "Social Engineering" thread on the Illiberal Left.

 

[Mr. Tea]

It's not, and I think you bring up a good point.

My interest here is: When NYT readers think that COVID hospitalization rates are 20x higher than they actually are—when 56% of young people believe that humanity is doomed b/c of climate change, when not a single scientific forecast includes an extinction event—well, it seems like liberal propaganda is (1) real (2) working.

And although it's been said a thousand times, it's still important to remind ourselves that inflated risk assessment ("we're in unprecedented danger") is exactly how authoritarianism is justified & flourishes. Post-9/11 hysteria is our best example, with its laughable rhetoric of how "every American is under threat," give me a fuckin break, 9/11 is a historical non-event and terrorists were never a real threat. And now we have vaguely authoritarian rhetoric being pushed by the left to confront the climate crisis + COVID. Which, look, it's not crazy behavior to say "we gotta give up some things to survive," like wearing masks indoors. But when it's questionable whether "survival" is actually at stake—when the danger is inflated by orders of magnitude—well, you're giving up liberties, morals for.... very little. It's just a bad trade.

But, like you say, there may also be a deep human desire to believe in apocalypse, and we can't fault media, political parties, etc—this is just people peopling, nothing to see, move along.

I think the idea that Homo sapiens is literally facing extinction is an extreme interpretation of the phrase "humanity is doomed." If you take it as shorthand for "human society as we have come to know it is doomed", and look at events that are realistically predicted to happen this century - widespread collapse of nation-states, resource wars, large parts of the planet becoming uninhabitable, many millions of climate refugees - then it's simply an acceleration of things that have been going on for years.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I'm not really worried that the American government is gonna take drastic measures to ward off Beelzebub.

Worth pointing out that some people who are quite serious about the threat posed by Beelzebub recently tried to ward off the American government.

 

[thirdform]

It's not, and I think you bring up a good point.

My interest here is: When NYT readers think that COVID hospitalization rates are 20x higher than they actually are—when 56% of young people believe that humanity is doomed b/c of climate change, when not a single scientific forecast includes an extinction event—well, it seems like liberal propaganda is (1) real (2) working.

And although it's been said a thousand times, it's still important to remind ourselves that inflated risk assessment ("we're in unprecedented danger") is exactly how authoritarianism is justified & flourishes. Post-9/11 hysteria is our best example, with its laughable rhetoric of how "every American is under threat," give me a fuckin break, 9/11 is a historical non-event and terrorists were never a real threat. And now we have vaguely authoritarian rhetoric being pushed by the left to confront the climate crisis + COVID. Which, look, it's not crazy behavior to say "we gotta give up some things to survive," like wearing masks indoors. But when it's questionable whether "survival" is actually at stake—when the danger is inflated by orders of magnitude—well, you're giving up liberties, morals for.... very little. It's just a bad trade.

But, like you say, there may also be a deep human desire to believe in apocalypse, and we can't fault media, political parties, etc—this is just people peopling, nothing to see, move along.

I think part of the leftists collusion with the capitalist state (call it state authoritarianism) is that the masses are just not involved in politics in the same they were in the mid 20th century. So the left are trying to mobilise a void - a void that they are even unaware is even there. Bizarrely @blissblogger has a good section on this in his wire article about hardstep and techstep jungle, That real is not so much the socialist real of the post-war democratic era, mass parties, unions, full employment, job flexibility, but the resigned acceptance that a socially constructed reality is natural. Resistance can be so impoverished by capitalism that it can often retreat into neo-medieval flights of fantasy, it does not always have to take the form of collective action. But the liberal left also profit (as in make money from) this reification. If you want to build a career based on politics, then the last thing you want to do is hastily seek out power without having profitted from being in political opposition for a long time. Which is what all border expert academics do. In essence whilst their research is indispensible to study their positionality within the regulation of the labour market is very dubiously ethical, if at all.

 

[thirdform]

there's also an easy cop out that whilst its true that homoeconomicus is basically the stereotypical capitalist European male considered in abstraction, this does not mean one can just say oh it's white supremacy so I refuse to study it. In fact, if it is so white supremacist, then this should be even more cause for you to study political economy and revitalise the critical position of the left. But the majority of the middle class despise working class aspirationalism, and I don't quite understand it on a gut level, despite being middle class myself. At least, not in the way say @luka understands it.