Whose left? The Americans? Sure.
The Culture Wars
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik and Imran hold a long overdue conversation about United's awful league form with 1 win in 7. They discuss a disappointing draw at Bournemouth, a not so disappointing draw against Liverpool and a crushing defeat at Chelsea - Is time nearly over for Erik Ten Hag?
Then in a special second half of the pod, Nik welcomes Natalie ( https://twitter.com/natalie_17) to discuss the fortunes of Manchester United Women as they booked a place in the FA Cup Final after a historic first ever win vs. Chelsea.
It’s an echo chamber of left leaning views - no different than any number of FB groups, private Twitter groups, What’sApp convos etc. that cater to a number of groups and issues across the political spectrum.
Facts, empathy, social justice, etc. all have a left leaning bias. I am happy and proud to be in that echo chamber as opposed to hating everything and everyone just because you are a bit of a cnut.
Pretty much. I mean, we've had plenty of genuine right-wingers, it's just that most of them have gotten themselves banned. Not for saying they believe in trickle down economics or austerity, but because they say something racist, or homophobic, or misogynistic, etc.
What an abomination of a decision.
Starkey would still be sitting on a pile of money and respect had he not published that interview
They definitely don't send their best that's for sure.
Don't understand this obsession about calling anything that isn't adopted by crazy politicians of today as "left".
I'm pretty center but I do believe in abiding by common sense based principles of not discriminating, caring for the suffering of others even if it means I can't trample over them to greater wealth and believing in inclusive growth. That's not left, nor is it socialist or communist. Its just trying your best to be a good person.
I'm pretty center but I do believe in abiding by common sense based principles of not discriminating, caring for the suffering of others even if it means I can't trample over them to greater wealth and believing in inclusive growth. That's not left, nor is it socialist or communist. Its just trying your best to be a good person.
Sounds like you're actually left, though.
I'm guessing you're referring to the inclusive growth bit? Inclusive growth is a basic principle of any economic doctrine. Even capitalism eventually has to benefit every one.
I back free markets, minimising govt intervention in most economic issues and do not believe in high taxation.
But that's exactly my point. There's a wide spectrum of issues, some on which I'll agree with "right" and some with others. None of which means I'm neccessarily "left". It just means I'm not with the abhorrent numpties that back today's Governments and can't see the widening unfairness
In that case, it seems like the right has left you behind.
When are people going to escape from viewing everything from within a flat, two-dimensional, left-right spectrum? There are many political issues and cultural topics that don't fit within this at all. The reductionist left-vs-right focus is exactly what the culture and system of technocracy likes, because it's a focus that's relatively shallow and largely avoids looking at deeper, root issues.
And as I've said before elsewhere, the parties of both left and right share a common support for technocracy.
On the flip side. Disinformation, hoax, fake news are also on the rise
Well, there is a clear trend of people belonging to the «far right» rejecting facts and conventional science. See the climate change debate.
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Is you asking is it a joke a joke???
Oh yes they actually do.
Let's just say that the right tends to be on the wrong side of history most of the time. Conservatism is one of those things that sounds sensible in theory - "let's put the brakes on those who want radical change, make sure society can keep functioning" - but in practice usually comes down to old men trying to fight things that the majority of the next generation already accepted. From women's suffrage to gay rights, from employee protections to childcare, conservatives of any given age tend to take up positions that seem ridiculous and unjustifiable to everyone a few decades later.
There are some pretty big assumptions on what the future will decide is the best way forward being made in this thread, Communism thought itself inevitable and progressive a hundred years ago.
It is also the case that a political and socially progressive policy can also lead to regressive effects and we are in the experiment as well as judging it. If you take for example more permissive attitudes around divorce. That has been seen as social progress but hasn't it also lead to more child poverty for example?
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The 22nc Century history teacher would be explaining to their students that everyone thought of travel as a progressive force broadening the mind and leading to cultural cross pollination.
Only later following the endless epidemics and the environmental catastrophe it caused could it be seen as a base and truly evil regressive instinct.
The mistake is seeing the changes to society you want to see from your world view prospective as progress. Therefore all other world views are regressive.
It is also the case that a political and socially progressive policy can also lead to regressive effects and we are in the experiment as well as judging it. If you take for example more permissive attitudes around divorce. That has been seen as social progress but hasn't it also lead to more child poverty for example?
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The 22nc Century history teacher would be explaining to their students that everyone thought of travel as a progressive force broadening the mind and leading to cultural cross pollination.
Only later following the endless epidemics and the environmental catastrophe it caused could it be seen as a base and truly evil regressive instinct.
The mistake is seeing the changes to society you want to see from your world view prospective as progress. Therefore all other world views are regressive.
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As humans we see trends and think they will go on forever but its a mistake to bet your house on it. Its also possible at this point that the radicals are having a conversation between themselves and their world views will collapse over time without ever taking hold on the mainstream. Especially as the culture doing most of the deciding on what is and isn't progress is faltering.
Well you could say that the left has been on the right side of history if you ignore the history of communism and failed socialist states. Social democracy has done pretty well so far though.
Likewise you could say capitalism has failed, due to the constantly increasing wealth and capital gap between the 1%ers and the rest over the last few decades.
Unfortunately, all the systems we’ve tried so far have been imperfect.
No system has produced something resembling the ideal society we would like to live in. In the modern western world the average person stil enjoys a far more privileged life than any time in history. The major problem is that we are destroying the planet, but communist and socialist states do/did this as well.
Take your pick where it works/worked unless of course we insist that these countries never really had anything to with socialism in the first place. I'm firmly behind fairly centrist social democracy going forward though like we have in most western european nations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states
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I'm not saying leftists are always right - they can be very, very wrong. I'm just saying that when it comes to divisive issues of society over at least the last hundred years, conservatives and reactionaries always tended to take the side that we now consider at best outdated, at worst barbaric. And I very much expect this to be the same with the majority of today's issues.
Well if we say instead of 100 hundred years and reduce it to around 60 years, I would say that social liberals have been more on progressive/(on the right side of things) vs conservative christians here in the west.
What exactly is a Culture War? Is it distinct in some way from the basic disagreements about politics and society which play out in the public sphere?
It's a radical evolution of the old left-right political spectrum we've all grown up with.
After WW2, the right wing came to represent the 'economic conservatism' of the pre-Depression era (laissez-faire, small government). Meanwhile, the left wing came represent the 'economic progressivism' that came after it (Keynesianism, the New Deal, Bretton Woods). Things remained that way for the rest of the twentieth century and into the early twenty first century.
The last few years has seen a huge paradigm shift. The right wing now represents 'power structure conservatism' (the 1%, white privilege, Christians). And the left wing represents 'power structure progressivism' (BLM, feminism, trans rights, immigration reform, police reform). That's the reason you get such weird bedfellows in the Republican Party: rednecks and old money may have totally different world views in most ways, but they both benefit from historical social stratifications in relation to the people around them. So they both vote Republican. That's why I think it's so dangerous to misunderstand what Trump brings to the table. As long as he's disrupting change, he's winning for his constituency.
Anyway, the culture war is what's happening right now between the new right wing and the new left wing. You can see an obvious example of the change if you think about Trump's trade policy with China. Free trade has traditionally been a keystone issue for the US right wing. But with Trump now platformed as the champion of 'power structure conservatism', the GOP will happily fall inline behind tariffs that would have very recently been regarded as oppressively left wing. The right wing is now fundamentally different from what it used to be.
I know I sound like a bit of a broken record on this, but I honestly believe that social media will be end of democracy as we know it. The social polarisation it creates has forced political discourse away from economics and into the realm of identity politics. A nation is only as strong as its sense of shared identity. American identity in particular is being eroded into a weird kind of neo-Casteism. And although this phenomenon is currently less pronounced in Europe than in America, it's definitely coming this way (Brexit may have been the first skirmish).
The culture wars are real, imo. They'll be the metaphorical (and probably also real) battleground that the future will be fought on.
Apart from his comments about J.K rowling here(her linking to anti-trans merchandise on twitter is clearly transphobic), I think he explains it pretty well here from his POV(which is mostly negative of course). But as I see it's basically about identity politics getting out of hand.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/09/29/the-culture-war-is-not-a-right-wing-myth/
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Sounds a lot like "the basic disagreements about politics and society which play out in the public sphere", and people who are particularly involved with these issues use war terminology to emphasise their strength of commitment to the cause. That's always happened.
"It's not made up by right wing bastards, and to prove it here I am, a right wing bastard making it up as I go along." Rowling has never posted anything transphobic and it's just the left gaslighting you? feck right off you lying, duplicitous, right wing bastard.
Utter trash article. Just patently making shit up.
I think the big difference is that the % of the population who consider themselves “particularly involved” is at an all time high thanks to social media. Which also allows them to spend a bigger % of their life arguing about politics and therefore takes up more of their day to day headspace.
Purely anecdotal but when I was in university 20 years ago there was only a very small minority of students who considered themselves in any way political. The vast majority wouldn’t have even thought about where they belong on the right wing to left wing spectrum. I don’t think that’s the case any more.
Yeah it was the same when I went to uni, when social media wasn't quite so culturally important but everyone my age used it. And from any recent research I've seen / ran it consistently comes back that the vast majority of the population, students included, don't consider themselves very interested in politics. I would be surprised if the % has shifted that much, it's just easier to see those people and their views now. At the end of the day they're still the segment of the population most likely to avoid voting even in national elections.
Abe Lincoln went down too.
Ok, that’s interesting. I kind of assumed it had got much more pervasive than that.
Yeah, so from a survey of 4,000 people in the UK last year, 24% of the population said they were "very interested" in politics. If you look at it by work / education status, people who are self-employed are twice as interested as students (30% self-employed, 15% students) and the only group who are less interested than students are housewives / househusbands. The average student takes part in 0.6 peaceful protests per year, compared to e.g. 0.4 for people who work full-time, or put another way just 26% of students say they have attended a peaceful demonstration compared to 20% of those working full-time.
If you look at it by age, it presents largely the same picture: 19% of 16-24 year olds say they're very interested in politics, 24% of 25-34, 24% of 35-44, 24% of 45-54, 26% of 55-64, 25% of 65+. It's incredibly consistent throughout generations. Younger people are a little more likely to take part in protests but not dramatically so, and while they do have different social attitudes overall, there's not a lot of evidence that they take an activist approach towards that. There's different ways to measure engagement with the issues, and interest in politics (within this political system) doesn't come close to describing the full picture, but generally speaking I don't see much evidence that many more people are much more engaged.
To me, the biggest impact of social media is distorting people's views of what the average person in x group thinks. I'm a lefty millennial but the loud bubble of lefty millennials on social media is not a remotely good representation of the strength of my views nor the severity of my approach, and that applies across all groups. Which isn't that different from the hippy sub-culture being broadcast to the masses and mapped onto an entire generation in a thoroughly misleading way, but it's obviously more accessible, in higher volume, and contextualised in a way that's better suited to grabbing your emotional attention.
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This could go in any one of a load of different threads but I’m going with this one. No particular reason. Feck it. Any excuse to give Bill Burr more exposure. The reaction on Twitter is hilarious. So much anger and confusion. From every part of the political spectrum.
Agree with this.
Adding that the 'impact of social media' isn't only what happens on its platforms, it's also the outside reporting, propaganda, cultural diagnoses, etc. based on it. This whole arrangement offers endless supply for every projective need.
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That attitude is a bit sad, really. Don't know how else to put it.
As for the last sentence, why should the 'triggering the libs' part of the spectrum be angry about this?
Because he takes the piss out of white women.