These nattering nabobs (term compliments of Spiro Agnew) are the essence of C.S.Lewis's claim that there is no greater scourge than those who believe in all their self-righteous guile that everything they do and foist upon the common man is for their own good. A pox on all of them, and even that is too good for them.
"... when Hungary’s young right-wing Fidesz party faced its own entrenched leftist post-Communist “deep state” in the late 90s and early 2000s, it responded by pivoting to a brilliant strategy of parallel organizing. Understanding that Hungarian civic life had been systematically corrupted and destroyed by the Communists, and the people left atomized and dispirited, the party deliberately turned away from “high” politics and founded what it called the “Civic Circles” movement."
I've come to believe that ALL of their ideas and values and proposals are defined and constrained by pure self-interest. We have a ruling class that's too weak and venal to even want to conceptualize itself as a ruling class. They simultaneously want to be children (without any rules or responsibilities) AND righteous - and we're all forced to give and sacrifice exorbitantly to help maintain their fantasy.
True, Self interest Yes but largely subconscious. It is of the essense of your full-of-shit Lefty that you have to believe - however shallowly and narcissistically - in your own virtue. Cynical, manipulative self-interest must no doubt happen as well....but that is a whole different ball game.
I agree 100%. It’s belief in things you WANT to believe in, because they make you feel good and win you social status. But it’s often institutions and power structures determining WHICH positions are coded as ‘kind’ and which earn status bonuses. It’s no accident that all of the left’s ‘empathy’ just happens to bolster and empower the bureaucracy.
So many points well taken, but so frustrating. The over-representation of blacks and gays on TV programs, and especially commercials, in the USA is maddening. I don't know why I let it get to me, but it does.
I am five years retired, but my experience as an educator at a Florida high school is one of white females who had black boyfriends, or were lesbians. Why? Simply because they thought it was cool, hip, or would make them popular to do so. There is nothing worse than an affluent, white, female, social justice warrior.
I like what John Waters said about the Clerisy Class who a part of the Establishment Blob
The Clerisy is the intellectual elite (professional class) or (anointed academics), mainly the buffer layer of ‘experts’ and mediators like journalists and academics, who, in return for crumbs from the oligarchic tables, will provide the new aristocracy with ideological air-cover.
You know something is awry when John Waters abandons the tribe. Which he has done. Yet even as an apostate he carries on. Which means that he must have had a lot of flamingos in the bank to survive on.
I haven't even finished reading the first paragraph of this post and Graham makes me feel so inadequate because I will likely never be able to write and wordsmith so well. [Which is my way of saying: "BRILLIANT!"]
Envy is not just a river in Egypt.
]Which reminds me of my favorite clip from the old Hollywood Squares game-show:
Peter Marshall: "Pride, Anger, Covetousness, Lust, Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth Are Collectively Know As What?"
The problem is, Social Justice is a fundamentalist faith-based religion, and rather than scripture they have an intersectionality algorithm. They are immune to logic, rationality, and reality. They live in a world and reality that is divorced from ours in every aspect. I don't know how you defeat religious fundamentalism. I don't even know if it is possible.
I knew Hare slightly at Cambridge in the 60s. I think he only talks to his own tribe, who populate Hampstead where he lives.
It's tricky for us conservatives who are surrounded by educated Leftwing contemporaries, but at least we are forced to understand them. Whereas there are so few of us they don't need to bother to return the compliment, which I fear gives them a certain tunnel vision.
To be an educated yet conservative Christian in this day and age? We are so rare we should have special status with a pension added. After all, King George III gave a pension to Dr Johnson, a highly educated Tory and Christian!
Yes the lazy - near total - incomprehension of the educated Left of any perspective other than their own is a hugely significant social phenomenon. It is in fact a defining characteristic of our long-20th c. political/philosophical discourse (or barrenness of it).
The only way to explore it as a theme, would be to foray into the online-Leftist ecosystem... but I imagine that would generate far more heat than light.
Literally, and I mean it when it use the word, every single show we watch has gay people, often subjecting us to kissing and bedroom scenes. We fast forward even the hetero scenes, since we don't need to watch people having sex, so maybe prudish we are. It is astonishing how many there are. I know we are just not accepting the truth that, like, 50% of us are actually attracted to the same sex. And it's been true in every era. Get with reality you homophobes.
I read articles like this, that coalesce so well what rumbles around in my head, and like the majority of us on the right, I just want to crawl back into my hole and live my normal humdrum life.
When my kids were little and I navigated the US subsidized health insurance web, I would get off the phone and tell my husband that this has to literally be how satan is working in the world. He is the father of confusion and chaos and the squasher of peace. It's the same way I feel about all that is addressed here. It's been infiltrating for 50 years with the 60s radical academics' dreams being fulfilled now. I really struggle with "what can be done?" and hopelessness over it. How do we slow drip sanity to reverse it? How do we mainline Jesus into the veins of culture?
Here in the US, the adds I reluctantly see while watching streaming shows or on YT are not representative at all of the country's demographics, it is a joke but it is no longer funny.
It has been the case for a long time, but got turbo charged during the COVID/Floyd madness.
The wokeification of entertainment, both casts and absolutely improbable narratives, is now a turn off for me and my wife.
Graham is right that is it is millions, tens, maybe hundreds of millions, of people identifying on the left who have a worldview that no longer coincides with reality.
It is a large epistemic bubble with solid concrete walls.
But I suppose one could say the same thing about the right as well, although the left/right description is no longer useful: a better one would be people working with their hands, or at least with "things", and people manipulating symbols.
We have a large class of people with high standards of living who no longer know how the world works.
The only time they look at a light switch with anticipation is when there is a blackout.
I am not so amazed at how the mainstream media became so radical and dishonest in the time of Brexit, Trump and COVID, it was a long time coming, but at how so many readers, listeners and viewers do not exercise just a little bit of skepticism.
I suppose their heuristics is to believe a certain class of commentators, and dismiss anybody else as "far right" or "fascist", "racist" for sure, and all the rest of the expletives used to discredit dissent.
Thanks for pointing out the insidious over-credentialed twits who lord it over us from their ivory towers. One of my favorite quotes is this: "Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot." - Richard Feynman
All males can be asset stripped in the Family Courts, based on VAWG lies which Starmer has been subtly propagating since he co-authored the 2012 Levitt Report with Alison Levitt.
Perhaps unsurprisingly as a result of this state-facilitated asset transfer, women's wealth is growing almost exponentially. See 'Increase in Women's Wealth' section of the link.
Does the political class intend to sacrifice men in the looming wars for residual oil and the rare earths required for batteries, then have women as controllable citizens and good little consumers, spending their gains while they spend time in the harems of the residual ultra-wealthy and powerful men. Women will flock to wealth, as long as there's plenty of it to go round.
And, they have an inbuilt preference for polyandry, as it minimises the possibility of genetic defects from a single father pervading her entire brood.
In 1990, the pamphlet 'The Family Way' was published by the Institute of Public Policy Research. Largely authored by feminist politician Harriet Harman, with feminist co-authors Anna Coote and Patricia Hewitt, Harman asserted this as her conclusion:
"It cannot be assumed that males are bound to be an asset in family life, or that the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means of social cohesion."
What she wishes is for the Welfare State to mimic the conditions extant in our reproductive beginnings on the savannah plains, where a 'family' was a woman and her children, sired by multiple men, and taken care of by the 'community'.
Unlike monogamy, there isn't a great deal of reward for men under such systems. Indeed, in the past, only 20% of men would have been successful in passing on our genes.
There's definitely something afoot. But, if women wish to impose their reproductive preferences from the stone age, they'll find themselves in an economic stone age. Men won't work.
These nattering nabobs (term compliments of Spiro Agnew) are the essence of C.S.Lewis's claim that there is no greater scourge than those who believe in all their self-righteous guile that everything they do and foist upon the common man is for their own good. A pox on all of them, and even that is too good for them.
The phrase "nattering nabobs of negativism" was created by Vice-President Spiro Agnew's speechwriter, the late and great William Safire.
Thanks for amplifying. So little of what politicians say actually originate with them. Most of them are too stupid to warrant original quotes.
Unlike leaders from the past who were brilliant thinkers
Perhaps the original founders, yes.
Regardless of what you think of A. Lincoln's *actions*, the Gettysburg Address is a fine piece of oratory and he wrote it all himself.
I would certainly not claim otherwise
What is to be done?
I was reminded of an essay by N.S.Lyons:
"... when Hungary’s young right-wing Fidesz party faced its own entrenched leftist post-Communist “deep state” in the late 90s and early 2000s, it responded by pivoting to a brilliant strategy of parallel organizing. Understanding that Hungarian civic life had been systematically corrupted and destroyed by the Communists, and the people left atomized and dispirited, the party deliberately turned away from “high” politics and founded what it called the “Civic Circles” movement."
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-rights-future-must-be-parallel
You need not necessarily endorse the Fidesz party's politics to learn from their strategy.
Perhaps this was why Charlie Kirk was murdered.
I've come to believe that ALL of their ideas and values and proposals are defined and constrained by pure self-interest. We have a ruling class that's too weak and venal to even want to conceptualize itself as a ruling class. They simultaneously want to be children (without any rules or responsibilities) AND righteous - and we're all forced to give and sacrifice exorbitantly to help maintain their fantasy.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-progressive-agenda-as-pure-class
True, Self interest Yes but largely subconscious. It is of the essense of your full-of-shit Lefty that you have to believe - however shallowly and narcissistically - in your own virtue. Cynical, manipulative self-interest must no doubt happen as well....but that is a whole different ball game.
I agree 100%. It’s belief in things you WANT to believe in, because they make you feel good and win you social status. But it’s often institutions and power structures determining WHICH positions are coded as ‘kind’ and which earn status bonuses. It’s no accident that all of the left’s ‘empathy’ just happens to bolster and empower the bureaucracy.
So many points well taken, but so frustrating. The over-representation of blacks and gays on TV programs, and especially commercials, in the USA is maddening. I don't know why I let it get to me, but it does.
I am five years retired, but my experience as an educator at a Florida high school is one of white females who had black boyfriends, or were lesbians. Why? Simply because they thought it was cool, hip, or would make them popular to do so. There is nothing worse than an affluent, white, female, social justice warrior.
The AWFLs are a plague on humanity.
Shouldn't there be a bit more vehemence in an actual diatribe....I think you've been entirely too nice 😊
I like what John Waters said about the Clerisy Class who a part of the Establishment Blob
The Clerisy is the intellectual elite (professional class) or (anointed academics), mainly the buffer layer of ‘experts’ and mediators like journalists and academics, who, in return for crumbs from the oligarchic tables, will provide the new aristocracy with ideological air-cover.
You know something is awry when John Waters abandons the tribe. Which he has done. Yet even as an apostate he carries on. Which means that he must have had a lot of flamingos in the bank to survive on.
exactly right
I haven't even finished reading the first paragraph of this post and Graham makes me feel so inadequate because I will likely never be able to write and wordsmith so well. [Which is my way of saying: "BRILLIANT!"]
Envy is not just a river in Egypt.
]Which reminds me of my favorite clip from the old Hollywood Squares game-show:
Peter Marshall: "Pride, Anger, Covetousness, Lust, Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth Are Collectively Know As What?"
Paul Lynde: "Oh ... The Bill of Rights."]
youtube.com/shorts/bAOrNQvHBB8
Thank you ShainS
The problem is, Social Justice is a fundamentalist faith-based religion, and rather than scripture they have an intersectionality algorithm. They are immune to logic, rationality, and reality. They live in a world and reality that is divorced from ours in every aspect. I don't know how you defeat religious fundamentalism. I don't even know if it is possible.
I knew Hare slightly at Cambridge in the 60s. I think he only talks to his own tribe, who populate Hampstead where he lives.
It's tricky for us conservatives who are surrounded by educated Leftwing contemporaries, but at least we are forced to understand them. Whereas there are so few of us they don't need to bother to return the compliment, which I fear gives them a certain tunnel vision.
To be an educated yet conservative Christian in this day and age? We are so rare we should have special status with a pension added. After all, King George III gave a pension to Dr Johnson, a highly educated Tory and Christian!
Yes the lazy - near total - incomprehension of the educated Left of any perspective other than their own is a hugely significant social phenomenon. It is in fact a defining characteristic of our long-20th c. political/philosophical discourse (or barrenness of it).
The only way to explore it as a theme, would be to foray into the online-Leftist ecosystem... but I imagine that would generate far more heat than light.
"It is more truly an amalgam of holier-than-thou narcissism, selective outrage and in-crowd groupthink."
All rooted IMHO in nihilism.
Literally, and I mean it when it use the word, every single show we watch has gay people, often subjecting us to kissing and bedroom scenes. We fast forward even the hetero scenes, since we don't need to watch people having sex, so maybe prudish we are. It is astonishing how many there are. I know we are just not accepting the truth that, like, 50% of us are actually attracted to the same sex. And it's been true in every era. Get with reality you homophobes.
I read articles like this, that coalesce so well what rumbles around in my head, and like the majority of us on the right, I just want to crawl back into my hole and live my normal humdrum life.
When my kids were little and I navigated the US subsidized health insurance web, I would get off the phone and tell my husband that this has to literally be how satan is working in the world. He is the father of confusion and chaos and the squasher of peace. It's the same way I feel about all that is addressed here. It's been infiltrating for 50 years with the 60s radical academics' dreams being fulfilled now. I really struggle with "what can be done?" and hopelessness over it. How do we slow drip sanity to reverse it? How do we mainline Jesus into the veins of culture?
Good ranting!
Here in the US, the adds I reluctantly see while watching streaming shows or on YT are not representative at all of the country's demographics, it is a joke but it is no longer funny.
It has been the case for a long time, but got turbo charged during the COVID/Floyd madness.
The wokeification of entertainment, both casts and absolutely improbable narratives, is now a turn off for me and my wife.
Graham is right that is it is millions, tens, maybe hundreds of millions, of people identifying on the left who have a worldview that no longer coincides with reality.
It is a large epistemic bubble with solid concrete walls.
But I suppose one could say the same thing about the right as well, although the left/right description is no longer useful: a better one would be people working with their hands, or at least with "things", and people manipulating symbols.
We have a large class of people with high standards of living who no longer know how the world works.
The only time they look at a light switch with anticipation is when there is a blackout.
I am not so amazed at how the mainstream media became so radical and dishonest in the time of Brexit, Trump and COVID, it was a long time coming, but at how so many readers, listeners and viewers do not exercise just a little bit of skepticism.
I suppose their heuristics is to believe a certain class of commentators, and dismiss anybody else as "far right" or "fascist", "racist" for sure, and all the rest of the expletives used to discredit dissent.
All very well said. And Yes we do need to replace the Left/Right axis with something better.
More full of shit/Less full of shit maybe?
Thanks for pointing out the insidious over-credentialed twits who lord it over us from their ivory towers. One of my favorite quotes is this: "Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot." - Richard Feynman
Thanks.....do you want to swap free subscriptions?
Sure! I just subscribed to you. Will be perusing your past stuff as well; if you do the same with me, I hope you'll find some gems.
Glad to have found you Graham. Don't have time now to go into detail but your writing is SUPERB. You have read Joan Didion I assume.
Thank you AJF.... and Yes, I have a book of her collected essays.
The concept of universal justice has been scrapped. The white male is treated more severely than others in the courts.
https://empathygap.uk/?p=4656
All males can be asset stripped in the Family Courts, based on VAWG lies which Starmer has been subtly propagating since he co-authored the 2012 Levitt Report with Alison Levitt.
https://empathygap.uk/?p=3476
https://bettinaarndt.substack.com/p/the-domestic-violence-triage-system?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=448263&post_id=204573711&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=1mvlzf&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
In fact, we don't even need to be married now.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/millions-of-unmarried-couples-to-get-stronger-rights
Perhaps unsurprisingly as a result of this state-facilitated asset transfer, women's wealth is growing almost exponentially. See 'Increase in Women's Wealth' section of the link.
https://www.2xglobal.org/new-to-gender-lens-investing/why-invest-with-a-gender-lens
Yet, the 'initiatives' just keep coming...
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/chancellor-everyone-can-do-something-for-womens-equality
But, where is it GOING..??
Does the political class intend to sacrifice men in the looming wars for residual oil and the rare earths required for batteries, then have women as controllable citizens and good little consumers, spending their gains while they spend time in the harems of the residual ultra-wealthy and powerful men. Women will flock to wealth, as long as there's plenty of it to go round.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygyny_threshold_model
And, they have an inbuilt preference for polyandry, as it minimises the possibility of genetic defects from a single father pervading her entire brood.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003347200917056
In 1990, the pamphlet 'The Family Way' was published by the Institute of Public Policy Research. Largely authored by feminist politician Harriet Harman, with feminist co-authors Anna Coote and Patricia Hewitt, Harman asserted this as her conclusion:
"It cannot be assumed that males are bound to be an asset in family life, or that the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means of social cohesion."
What she wishes is for the Welfare State to mimic the conditions extant in our reproductive beginnings on the savannah plains, where a 'family' was a woman and her children, sired by multiple men, and taken care of by the 'community'.
Unlike monogamy, there isn't a great deal of reward for men under such systems. Indeed, in the past, only 20% of men would have been successful in passing on our genes.
There's definitely something afoot. But, if women wish to impose their reproductive preferences from the stone age, they'll find themselves in an economic stone age. Men won't work.
just to say that I've still got a long reading backlog....but haven't forgotten you.
Just notice that the guy from The Blob looks surprisingly like Joe Biden.