What gets me
are people
who do not
care.
How can they
do that? I
will never
know.
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Everyone who isn’t depressed cares about something/someone, even if, as in the case of our Prime Scrounger, it is only themself. And many care about whichever community/tribe(s) they identify with, whether class, team, ethnicity, etc. Caring about humanity in the round is fairly unusual, it seems. Caring about our entire planetary ecosystem, humanity included, seems even rarer. Which version of caring are you referring to?
Those beyond their immediate interest group
Those affected by my actions or my inaction?
There are people who are brilliant at caring, and people who are not.
The neo-liberal view is that government should get out of the way of the first group of people so their activities can flourish.
The progressive view is to call the second group of people fascists in the hope they feel guilty about not being in the first group.
Which approach leads to the more caring society I wonder?
That is utter drivel about neoliberalism, which says the market cares
You are trolling
Richard you frequently state that anyone voting Conservative is a fascist and anyone who voted for Brexit is a racist..I have never come across anyone who is so hostile to those who have different opinions to you. You are a very divisive. It is difficult to reconcile hostile and divisive with caring.
If you do not understand that calling out the oppressors and abusers is the very essence of caring then I guess you are most definitely one of those who does not care
“calling out the oppressors and abusers”..basically nearly half of the electorate voted Brexit and or for the Tories..this highlights the hostility and divisive nature I was referring to..do you really believe nearly half the population are “oppressors, abusers, racist and fascist”????..this isn’t caring it is you abusing normal, hard working people with families.
It’s 30%, actually
And yes I do
I think there could be that many misogynists, homophbes, racists and more in society
And I will call them what they are
So anyone who voted other than Conservative and voted remain are not misogynists, homophobes, oppressors or abusers??..this is how ridiculous you sound. You really are a nasty piece of work and barking mad with it
I did not say that
But I note you do not condemn the misogyny, the homophobic, racism or abuse of human rights
You just call out the person ho notes that we have a major political party supported by 30% of the population who supports these things
Why are you so keen on abuse? Tell me, please? The babes I use describe this abuse. You just call names. Try a reasoned argument. But, I stress, more abuse will not get on.
Another fake boxer ? Herol “Bomber” Graham
I really should learn my boxers
Fascism needs calling out now so the countries populace can stop a government and establishment hell bent on perusing that narrative. Not all tories or brexiters are fascists but are complicit in bringing it in. The writer May should read the excellent book Authoritarianism by Hannah Arandt. Remember this countries ‘leader’ is not a fit person for the title
Thank you
@ Alan
“So anyone who voted other than Conservative and voted remain are not misogynists, homophobes, oppressors or abusers??”
This, my dear boy, is a non sequitur.
May I kindly suggest you divert your time to educating yourself about logical fallacies and how to avoid using them before you make a fool of yourself online again?
Thanks in advance.
Thatcher came out with her “no such thing as society” crap circa 1980. This view, combined with Chicago School economics, have held sway in the so called democratic West since, and look where we are.
Their UNCARING policies have wreaked havoc in the developed world and made it almost impossible for the poorest in the undeveloped countries to have any semblance of a decent life.
It is the duty of all who do care to call out the charlatans behind these scams. History has shown that fascists and racists cannot be reasoned with. The only time they listen is when they have a boot on their throats.
I am not advocating violent revolution, but I do believe that the arguments against the neoliberals must be made more forcibly. How can we expect progress in U.K. for example when the leader of the Labour Party is a knight of the realm, and many of its now less active leaders sit in the House of Lords? When the leaders are “soup takers” the suffering will continue.
The knighthood went with his job
Can we be a bit more realistic in what we oppose?
You could say that the Conservatives under Macmillan and Heath may have had some sort of social conscience, but with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, it has been heading steadily towards fascism. First with the crushing of trade unions and more recently by the blatantly racist hostile environment policy ending with the Windrush tragedies and now the forceful deportation of migrants to Rwanda and proposals to abandon international laws on human rights.
Caring about others beyond our immediate social circle, as Richard so obviously does, is what makes us human. But we also need to retain a sense of perspective and calm for our own mental well-being. As W H Davies put it: “What is this life if full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?” I recommend people take time to read the full poem ( https://englishverse.com/poems/leisure ) before getting too wound up by the trolls.
I know the poem
But I think it our duty to care
During such times as these, Richard’s questions are reasonable ones, and given the nature of his work – he’s entitled to ask them in my view. It’s a shame only the trolls and naysayers have taken the opportunity to stick the boot in so far.
The answers? Well, they are complex. I offer an attempt only:
1) In any society at any time, there will be a group of people whose attitudes chime with a certain way of doing politics. After WWII and its sacrifices and harsh lessons about fascism, the country was ready for the NHS, social security and the welfare State. Today, we have lots of people who are responsive to Fascism – the way it divides people and makes forming an alternative so incoherent. BREXIT was pure fascism at work – dividing people – as was immigration policy and blaming immigrants for causing education and health service problems in order to cover up that the Tories have been underfunding services since 2010 so that they can privatise them.
2) Austerity is really a way brutalising people. This is what you do when you withdraw and limit things and services that people need. People who need such help will either club together (start a food bank; help a Ukranian refugee) whilst others knuckle down and try to get on with it rather than admit that they are not coping. This latter group will find themselves aligning with others of the same make up and are a very vulnerable or useful group depending on how low as a politician you are prepared to go to exploit them. These people will wear their circumstances as a badge of pride and not have time for those who crumble under these circumstances whom they consider to be weak. This hardening of people to their own plight is exploited. They will all too often turn on others in the same situation rather than turn on those who make them poor. When you are angry, confused, cold and hungry, you are easily led.
3) Our education system does not help people to see that they are being politically manipulated and does not actually explain how our political system works. Because our political system likes to paint itself as legitimate and democratic we are not taught to question it much. The reason why this is because what has been happening over the years is that the House of Windsor has been creeping back in with its notion of ‘Head of State’, when in fact we’d actually got rid of this idea ages ago. This creates a lot of confusion amongst the people because the politicians- our real rulers – have been content to accommodate this incursion and use the HoS idea to legitimise their political programmes. The Tories are masters of this ruse. The fact that the Tories have now tested our ‘constitution’ to destruction means that they will increasingly resort to ‘royal’ validation for legitimacy. The problem with the House of Windsor is that it acts likes indicator of social status and implies a rigid system of social strata so that everyone knows their place. and accepts their lot. No questions asked. And that includes not asking about unfairness and questioning it – seemingly not caing.
I contrast this aspect with ex-Eastern Europeans (Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Croats, Serbs, Slovenians and even Russians) in this country and they are markedly different in their attitudes. They are actually more weary of being being manipulated than the average Brit – I kid you not. However, I notice that it is the older East Europeans who remember fascist communism who think like this, not always the younger ones.
4) Wealth – as I have noted here before, wealth changes people – money changes people and lots of it changes people even more. When you have enough money not to worry about the COLC or ride out inflation or enough money to never have to worry about anything then it can affect your empathy with others who do not. There is a lot of this in this country. Having lots of money means that you have the money power to buy anything you need – healthcare, care in old age or sickness. So all the human qualities you have like empathy, being able to talk to and work with people, negotiate, kindness, reciprocity etc., are dispensed with because your money/wealth speaks for you. You don’t need these other people’s humanity, you just list your demands and buy it. A transaction replaces mutual cooperation. Wealth I’m afraid makes you less of a cooperative human being. Wealth retards normal human qualities and competences that makes us a successful species – our ability to work together to solve problems, to survive as a group. The only exception the wealthy allow of course is cooperation amongst those who are as wealthy as them – in the same economic class where co-operation is essential in maintaining your wealth and position. Or ‘networking’ of course!
A lot of these people are those who have benefited from years of Thatcherism – financial workers, hand maidens like managers and CEOs (those who help move money from the many to the few) those working in and owning the media and all too often getting into politics. They use their position to signal to society that they are there on merit and you are either successful or not. And if the latter, well, that can only be your fault. Why should they care?
5) Not caring is socially stratified by motive – in the lower income groups you’ve either accepted your lot and are too busy surviving or hating who you’ve been told by the media to hate to care or if you are at the top, you realise that it is better to be doing the screwing rather than be screwed – it’s just the law of the jungle. At this level, not caring is about divide and conquer. After all, you have a certain lifestyle to maintain which becomes THE object.
6) Fascism: fascism is back big time. In fact, it never went away. After WWII, we were all big on fascism and perhaps the reason why we went towards progressive ideas was to prevent the conditions that existed in Germany (one of the most advanced states in Europe prior to WW1) that led to the Nazis getting into power in the inter war years. Isn’t it sort of funny however one minute we were being made aware of Fascism then all of a sudden, it was not Fascism that was the bogey man – no, it was Communism.
Our American cousins were really spooked by communism and went all in on it. Despite even saying that countries were free to choose their own form of Government, if you wanted socialism or communism the Americans were not actually going to let you do it. And they didn’t – from Africa, to Europe to their own back door.
At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966, about U.S involvement in Vietnam, the U.S Government was openly criticised by American foreign policy experts for being too obsessed with communism – overly sensitive and also disruptive and potentially dangerous with their obsession. They were advised to chill out.
In fact, the more you think about it, the more your realise that the U.S intolerance of communism or socialism is the sort of intolerance you associate with Fascism!! The inability to cope with a politically plural world. Ahhh – the poor Americans. They became Fascists without even knowing it.
And poor us. As a result of American influence, the West intellectually took its eye off the ball in the post war era and concentrated on Communism – not Fascism, which actually should have been eradicated. Fascism was allowed to linger and fester.
The next intellectual mistake was to believe that we’d beaten Communism from about 1989 and as such, we didn’t need those progressive ideas like the New Deal or social security because people would not be drawn to communism as it was dead. In other words, we could treat the poor and working people badly again and they would not become communists!
What we did not realise in our hubris was that as we set about destroying social security systems and our post war economies that we would be nurturing, feeding and helping to resurrect Fascism instead as these systems broke down and made people’s lives harder and angrier.
Aren’t we clever?
And communism? I’ve read a lot about what communism should be and it’s nothing like what I saw in Soviet Russia. What I see in Soviet Russia is Left wing Fascism as opposed to Right wing as we saw in Germany.
I still contend that Fascism is not actually a political belief like Left or Right: rather it is the scientific method of political absolutism; political mono-culturalism; political non-pluralism.
Fascism negates ‘The Other(s)’. And if you have no Others to work with, or you pretend that they don’t exist by being intolerant of them then you have no Others to care about. Fascism is anti-politics – the art of working together and win/win. Fascism negates politics. Fascism is TINA. Fascism negates empathy. It negates humanity – what made us a successful species in the first place, co-operating, the reciprocity of being kind to one another even. Fascism negates caring for those who are not like us – it makes us dispense with them instead. Humanity goes out the window when Fascism is rampant.
We are living now in a Fascist world. We have to come to terms with it. Like the racial war in the U.S. South , Fascism never stopped. Because as Hannah Arendt tried to tell us, Fascism is always there in society waiting to be unleashed.
Now, having tried to explain all that I will also contend that there are people who care. It’s not all bad. Regular contributors here all care. Look at Twitter’s response when Richard writes there? Who is running that food bank over there? Even during the Nazis and the Soviet cod-communists there were people who were still human beings. The lights did not go out – but they were dimmed for sure, but not extinguished.
And further hope should be in recognising that Fascism is an extremist position. Whether it political, economic or religious – Fascism has in it the seeds of its own destruction like all extremist positions. It can be subjugated and one day we might learn how to get rid of it (Clue: less inequality to be exploited for personal gain).
If we begin to see Fascism as a political technique – a divisive one – then we can begin to at least make the language of fascism – it’s ‘unleashing potential’ on mankind illegal. This would mean that the editors of newspapers from the The Sun, the Daily Mail and even The Mirror and ‘Socialist Worker’ would have to be very careful about what they wrote about social issues. And those rules would also need to apply to the internet too.
And the same would go for our politicians – and why not? This would also help with the development of PR because it would change the language of politics from adversarialism to accommodation.
Fancy that – Living together – like all our Gods advised us to do (whoever your God is).
I’m no Oxford don or extensively published public intellectual or even a nice middle class boy like Richard. I’m a working class ruffian wage slave in the public sector who managed to creep into University by the back door (an access course) and for all I know I’ve just rambled on here talking a load of old crap. I do my best.
But even if that is the case, its’ better for me to do this than allow myself to be manipulated by other people’s malign agendas and to see my neighbours, co-workers and other unfortunates as the problem.
It’s not easy to do, but I would just ask others to just try not to be had so much by Fascist techniques – eh?
Please – it’s in your own best interests in the end.
Thanks
I find it difficult to see how any reasonably intelligent and reasonably well informed person could vote for the current Tory party and not be, at least to some extent, a fascist. It’s not as if there was any secret about what they stood for before the last election. I don’t the idea that, whatever you might think of Brexit, the idea that the Tories might “get Brexit done” is much of an excuse.
People may have had all sorts of reason for having voted for Brexit. From the woman who was hoping it would help her business when employment rights were scrapped only to find her business folding because she could no longer afford to export to her customers in Europe, to the supporters of the DUP who supposedly were hoping it would lead to a hard border on the island of Ireland. Maybe some did believe that the NHS would benefit from £350 million a week or that food and energy prices would fall, but they surely can’t still believe that. If such as these still think Brexit was a good idea then I can’t see any other reason for this but racism.
Richard
I despair.
Let’s face it, Boris is going nowhere and Tories are here to stay for the long term. I am begining to think that they are only part of the problem and issue.
There is no outrage amongst the mass population and it seems like that many many many millions all over the world actually favour and accept injustice, racism, facism, discrimination, inequality, the list goes on and on.
The revolution and change you and others have been calling for has never taken off and it does not look like it ever will.
The truth is that there are many people around the world who just do not care.
It also seems that the younger future generation are not interested in caring at all.
As a result I am really tired and have resigned to the fact that we now live in a world where there is no hope for things to get better, no real action towards sorting out the real problems, no willingness to change, no tolerance of others.
We have to care
Or your vision becomes reality