Reply To: Remember him?

[Gurnelista]

That’s true IA. And most of it is used by the political right as a distraction from talking about other, far more important issues such as growing inequality, climate change, the unsustainable consumption of resources, Me2, BLM, transgender rights, the national past, and injustices experienced by minorities of all kinds.

It’s obvious that the free market is broken and failing to deliver, so it has to lie (hence Trump, Johnson Farage and co) and / or talk about something else as a distraction.

Something else, like what? Like Brexit, daft conspiracy theories put about by Alex Jones and others, or abortion issues, or a ‘war on woke’.

See how these issues often get a moral dimension attached to them, which makes it hard for the hard of thinking to disagree, e.g. the EU is said to be ‘undemocratic’ which is morally wrong (and ignores the undemocratic voting system here, or the unelected House of Lords, lifetime peerages, the Lords spiritual, etc. etc. We also see that immigrants are often labelled illegal, and so they become morally wrong. We hear that abortion rights are morally wrong. And if you disagree with how your national past is represented, you’re unpatriotic, which is close to being morally wrong, too…

Of course it’s just nonsense, a distraction from the sick state of the economy and environment. But if you’re white, elderly, reasonably well off and feel served by the current arrangements, you’re less likely to see it that way. And if you’ve had a lifetime steeped in religion, and let a book like the Tora, Koran or Bible etc. do your thinking for you, you almost certainly won’t. You don’t want to talk about diversity and equality and change. They’re seen as threatening. Even worse, religion will be interpreted as giving support to monsters like Farage and Trump, support which is thicker than a whale omelette.

And that concludes today’s Ted Talk.