Life today is not just a moral maze: it is a moral maze inhabited by people who have no idea they’re in a maze, let alone a moral one.
Bloomberg interviews a “liberal” Ivy League college professor. He talks herded media-crap about Russian meddling in elections (“there’s just no doubt about it”) and the “nasty politics of skinheads in Poland and Nazis in Hungary”, then writes off President Trump as “mentally unbalanced”.
We cut to a commercial break, during which an ad extols the virtues of the Philippines for investors….a country currently run by a bloke whose politics make Trump’s look like those of a McGovern Democrat.
Trump is an infant, but he understood the electorate a year ago when every privileged “liberal” and their media got it spectacularly wrong.
In Africa, a military bloodless coup potentially rids the people of Zimbabwe of a homicidal maniac who has turned a once prosperous country into a hyperinflationary joke. Having lauded the gargoyle Mugabe for fully 37 years, African Union leaders refuse to endorse the coup “until such time as democracy has been restored”.
I understand the AU’s reticence about giving a benediction to military takeover: but during four decades of rigged elections, electoral intimidation, racist murder and outrageous State pillaging, it did not one jot to condemn the Zimbabwean dictator. Furthermore, it’s quite hard to find an unstained democrat among their number.
They care about their image as post-colonial leaders; but they don’t care a stuff for their citizens.
In the UK, Paperchase decides to run a promotion in the Daily Mail. It then gets hammered by agitprop Momentum Nazis Stop Funding Hate for using the Daily Mail. It duly gives this grovelling apology on Twitter:
This one really represents triple-headed stupidity by all concerned in the saga. The Dacre Wail is amoral in its sanctimonious critique of amorality purely for the sake of circulation. Stop Funding Hate does not however grasp that, in a Free Society, media that stay within the law are entitled to exist. And Paperchase itself lacks the spine to say “We use media to reach our audience, and that is our right”.
The Daily Mail is quit happy to target social depravity in its literary content, and glorifies it in photography obsessed with mammories and buttocks. Paperchase is quite happy to exert zero ethics in its media choice, and then apologise to bullying censorship. And SFH wants to stop funding hate, but chooses to do this through the medium of hateful fascist bullying.
What a mess.
Let’s summarise all three contemporary events for the “examples” they set:
- It is OK to teach the benefits of McCarthyism in the US education system
- It is OK to further push that agenda in TV editorial “debate”
- It is OK to advertise fascist dictators, but socialist dictators must be crushed
- It is OK to let an ally off purely on the basis of his ethnicity
- It is OK to put your cultural solidarity before the needs of citizens
- It is OK to demonise and glorify the same thing purely for monetary gain
- It is OK to impose your ideology on others via social media bullying
- It is OK to collaborate with intolerant censors.
I am not going for the sympathy vote here: I have a nice life that many would sell at least one limb to have. I was born in the West, educated in a briefly meritorious culture, and able to avoid the horrors of war.
That said, I worked hard to get all this, I have never knowingly stepped on a face to get it, and the work I did was of proven economic benefit. When I was young we had 83% tax rates. Now I am old, we have Zirp.
In writing this blog now, I have no personal, ulterior motive. Much of the time I find it stimulating, but I don’t get paid a penny for it, and nor is it a showcase for my work: we live in such an ageist society, at 69 years of age no literary agent or publisher would touch me with a bargepole.
But Jesus Christ Almighty, at times it can be depressing.
When you look at the multivariate problems of narrow education, perverted civics, ideological rigidity, ends justifying means, the sorry absence of civilised debate, the near ubiquity of cognitive dissonance, the acquiessence of the comfortable classes, and the dilution of considered foresight, it all-too-frequently evokes the question, “Where on Earth do we start?”
It would be comforting to think that all the econo-political neolibs, neocons, liberals and socialists know where to start, but they obviously don’t: let’s face it, if they have no idea where their mad theories will end, they’re sure as Hell going to be clueless on the subject of how to start putting their already discredited policies right.
Ironically, the number of English synonyms of ‘discredited’ is quite astonishing. They include the following….but look how many are suggestive of asserted insult rather than applied, deconstructive analysis:
Could it be, therefore, that we are wired as a linguistic species to club ideas opposing ours to death rather than debate in what used to be called “a civilised manner”? Are we just accidentally intelligent thugs craving material comfort for ourselves and f**k the needs of community? Is the liberal democracy dalliance at an end, and about to be replaced by might-is-right forced choice corporate dictatorship?
For myself, I don’t believe this: I tend more towards Locke, Plato and Bentham than Hobbes, Stalin and Hitler. But I am here to tell you, our systems, structures and above all our self-appointed élites have buried the plot under 5,000 tons of concrete in a lead-lined igneous stone coffin.
This is a case of Dig for Victory or Die a Coward. The choice is ours.
The Slog 