Author Topic: The moral superiority of the left.  (Read 1768 times)

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Offline Venturi Swirl

The moral superiority of the left.
« on: August 21, 2020, 08:56:24 AM »
Many on the left of politics seem to believe that they are morally superior beings to those that don’t identify as left wing.  Have they got a point or are they simply self-satisfied, smug and delusional?

Discuss.
"Surely the fact that their accounts were different reinforces their veracity rather than diminishes it? If they had colluded in protecting ........ surely all of their accounts would be the same?" - Faithlilly

Offline Venturi Swirl

Re: The moral superiority of the left.
« Reply #1 on: August 22, 2020, 11:31:15 PM »
The left-wing zealots are threatening our freedom
Paul Embery
As a socialist and trade unionist, I despair of the modern Left and its propensity to do everything in its power to alienate the very people for whom it purports to speak. So wrong is its stance on so many social and moral questions, that you wonder whether it even wants the votes of traditional left-wing voters anymore. Perhaps it would be happier as a self-indulgent protest lobby, its ranks of middle-class, city-dwelling, bohemian types smoking their weed and listening to Bob Dylan tracks.

These people preach peace and harmony, while reciting the mantra of ‘Live and let live’ and speaking of the need for ‘tolerance’, ‘diversity’ and ‘respect’ – all the usual buzzwords. Except that in practice they do the precise opposite of these things, openly frowning upon the lifestyle choices of working-class folk, while displaying a sneering intolerance towards their opinions and demanding rigid conformity of political thought.

The modern Left’s contempt for alternative opinions derives not only from an innate sense of its own moral superiority, but also from the absurd notion that to promote one way of living is to somehow discriminate against ‘the other’
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Nowhere is this illustrated more starkly than in their attempts to be the moral arbiters on the question of what may be considered acceptable language in public discourse.

We are now a long way down the road to the modern Left’s desired destination – a place where the expression of traditional views that are still held by millions and were relatively mainstream as recently as 20 years ago are, to all intents and purposes, proscribed.

For example, try discussing with these people – the self-appointed guardians of enlightened society – the idea that immigration levels are too high and should be reduced. You’re a xenophobe. Try saying that kids are better served being raised by two parents, one of each sex. You’re a homophobic bigot. Don’t believe someone with the anatomy of a man can suddenly become a woman just because he says he is? Transphobe. Believe multiculturalism, the active promotion of separation and difference, has been a monumental failure? Racist. (A bizarre one this, since one can of course be a committed multiracialist while disavowing multiculturalism.)

The modern Left’s contempt for alternative opinions derives not only from an innate sense of its own moral superiority, but also from the absurd notion that to promote one way of living – to suggest that society benefits more from one taking one path rather than another – is to somehow discriminate or show prejudice against ‘the other’.

The modern Left, with its hectoring, screeching intolerance, must be confronted.
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There are no shades of grey in their world. You’re either with them or you’re a knuckle-dragger.

The purpose, of course, is to shut down debate and establish a public narrative that fits with their own worldview. It’s a pincer attack, which uses the ever-tightening grip of the law on the one hand – supporting increasingly draconian legislation designed to deter ‘hate speech’ (whatever that is) – and the threat of public condemnation and excommunication from polite society on the other.

We should be in no doubt that the paternalistic censors are winning the day
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And it’s working. We should be in no doubt that the paternalistic censors are winning the day.

It wasn’t always thus. In fact, the extent to which those who comprise the modern Left understand so little of the traditions of socialist politics is remarkable. They fail to realise that their dogmatic authoritarianism is, in fact, inimical to the best traditions of the labour movement, which understood from its early days that open discussion and debate around competing views and ideas was fundamental to building democracy and unity throughout its ranks.


See, the modern Left thinks the world began in 1968 (or, for the younger ones, with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader). Their Left is the one of ‘liberation’, of the cultural revolution, of liberal cosmopolitanism, of open borders, of the shaking off of ‘oppressive’ authority and disregard for the concept of personal responsibility and restraint. So far as they have any knowledge or interest at all in the labour movement’s roots in Christian socialism, its patriotism, belief in the centrality of family, community, reciprocity and personal morality, they are embarrassed by it.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this, the modern Left has seen its ideas achieve dominance not only throughout the Labour party – in fact, they infect all main political parties to a greater or lesser extent – but the trade union movement, liberal media and public sector too. Its long march through the institutions is well advanced.


But there will be a price to pay for this political and cultural hegemony when it eventually comes. And that price can already be seen in the utter estrangement of millions of hard-working families from the political process, ostracised as they are by a political class that not only fails to reflect their views and desires, but actively seeks to delegitimise and toxify them. The tragedy for some of us inside the Labour party is that many of these millions were once loyal Labour voters who saw the party as their natural home. They were our people. But no longer. These days, the party sees them as some kind of embarrassing elderly relative.

Such is the arrogance of the modern Left, it has never stopped to ask itself why this schism has occurred, less still to take any responsibility for it. So it ploughs on regardless, certain in its own moral rightness, intent on driving ‘unpalatable’ opinions from the public square and marginalising those who dare espouse them.

To hell with these dictatorial assaults on free speech, with their echo chambers, safe spaces and phoney outrage
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In the end, these zealots threaten the freedom of all of us. And that’s why they must be faced down remorselessly. To hell with their dictatorial assaults on free speech, with their echo chambers, safe spaces and phoney outrage. No more the craven apologies for having expressed a genuinely-held view. Make your case, stand your ground and be prepared to take the brickbats. If people are offended, tough. It’s time to hit back against the group-thinkers and no-platformers.

The modern Left, with its hectoring, screeching intolerance, must be confronted. It doesn’t speak for me, nor for millions of fellow working-class people. And it never will.
"Surely the fact that their accounts were different reinforces their veracity rather than diminishes it? If they had colluded in protecting ........ surely all of their accounts would be the same?" - Faithlilly

Offline Venturi Swirl

Re: The moral superiority of the left.
« Reply #2 on: August 24, 2020, 01:18:45 PM »
"For as long as the Labour Party is dominated by a belief that they are morally right, they will continue to believe that those that disagree with them are deficient in some way.  This moral certainty is why they can be so offensive and fail to see their own deficiencies including, in recent years, [ censored word]emitism". Evan Price, today's Times.
"Surely the fact that their accounts were different reinforces their veracity rather than diminishes it? If they had colluded in protecting ........ surely all of their accounts would be the same?" - Faithlilly

Offline Venturi Swirl

Re: The moral superiority of the left.
« Reply #3 on: September 20, 2020, 05:34:21 PM »
As something of a Lefty myself I have to say this is bang on the money

Grayson Perry is right on the left’s bad attitude
Dominic LawsonSeptember 06 2020, 12.01am
At a convivial Christmas party last year (those were the days) I was approached by the rather wonderful Marina Wheeler. The just-divorced wife of Boris Johnson said she wanted to apologise over an argument we had had more than 20 years ago. Marina, whose family background and personal political views were more aligned with the Labour Party, had reacted sharply when I told her that people on the left tended to have the false conceit that they were nicer than those with right-of-centre political opinions. This brilliant lawyer — who has never become a Conservative, as far as I know — said she had now reconsidered, and no longer held the view that to be left wing was an indicator, in itself, of superior character, or virtue.

I wondered, but did not ask, whether her change of mind was based on any abuse her children might have received purely on account of who their father was. Because some years earlier I had been told by the wife of a member of David Cameron’s cabinet that a number of fellow parents at her children’s school had made it painfully clear they didn’t want their little ones to spend any time, socially, with the offspring of a wicked Tory.

These conversations bubbled back into my thoughts last week as I read a Radio Times interview with the cross-dressing ceramicist and former Reith lecturer Grayson Perry about his new Channel 4 series, Grayson Perry’s Big American Road Trip. Perry told his interviewer that in his encounters with the divergent elements in that nation’s culture war, “I would say the right on average are friendlier and more open”. He added that “the left is more venal and has more antipathy to the opposition than the other way round”.

He had said something similar in an interview two weeks ago with The Sunday Times, telling Decca Aitkenhead of his experiences in America: “The right, I hate to say it, are on the whole more reasonable. More open-minded, more forgiving.”

I suppose the reason Perry hated to say it is that he has long identified with the left: before the 2015 general election, declaring “I’ve been a Labour supporter my entire life”, he designed a Vote Labour tote bag.

Perry’s more recent observations, admittedly based on the highly selective and even contrived nature of made-for-TV encounters, may amount to little more than colourful anecdotage. But they are — particularly from such a source — a pointed challenge to the conventional wisdom that to be on the left is to be more caring or generous-spirited. After all, it signals that you want to pay more taxes to help the less well off: what more proof is required?

Sponsored

A forensic retort to this argument — or at least a corrective to its superficiality and moral vanity — was provided more than a decade ago by the American political scientist Arthur Brooks, in his book Who Really Cares. He found that Republicans not only gave more to charity than Democrats: they donated more blood, too. The author, not himself a Republican, asserted that “although liberal families’ incomes average 6% higher than [those of] conservative families”, the latter “gave, on average, 30% more to charity”. As one startled reviewer remarked: “The belief that liberals care more about the poor may scratch a partisan or ideological itch, but the facts are hostile witnesses.”

Brooks’s conclusion was that many on the left believed that the way they voted was sufficient demonstration of their concern for the poor and that they needed to do nothing further (regardless of whether the party they supported won power or not).

Perry also attacked what he called the “‘I/we’re so right’ snobbishness” of the American left. In UK terms, he would be talking about Guardian rather than Mirror readers. It is in the pages of The Guardian that one can see the most frequent manifestations of the notion that Conservatives are inherently the worst sort of person. Online, it has marketed T-shirts bearing the remark of Aneurin Bevan that Tories “are lower than vermin”, and it was there that Charlie Brooker wrote a column declaring that the Conservative Party “appeals exclusively to bigots, toffs, money-minded machine men … and selfish, grasping simpletons who were born with part of their soul missing.”

Brooker concluded that “to reach a more advanced stage of intellectual evolution, humankind must first eradicate the ‘Tory instinct’ from the brain.”

It’s not exactly intelligent to suggest a form of lobotomy for well over a third of the population, but Brooker is a hero to his fellow middle-class leftists — many of whom share his almost biological hatred of those of a different political affiliation. It goes some way to explaining the school-gate experiences of that cabinet minister’s wife.

Perhaps the fact that the Conservatives have been in power for so long accounts for some of this hatred. But when you keep failing to win over the public, you can end up acting as though you hate the voters, too, which is not a good look. There is an internecine element to it: there has long been, on the left, an obsession with a form of purity (in view, rather than behaviour), which has now developed into what is called “cancel culture”.

Jeremy Corbyn’s appeal was precisely to that idea of purity. But when the gay Labour MP Angela Eagle challenged his leadership in 2016, she received hundreds of “abusive, homophobic and frightening” messages from party members — and a brick thrown through the window of her constituency office.

The evidence that those on the centre-right tend to take a more tolerant view of political differences was provided last year by YouGov. It published a poll showing that a third of Labour voters would be upset if a child of theirs married a Conservative, whereas only 13% of Conservatives would be upset if one of their children married a Labour voter.

Perhaps this just illustrates the point that to be left wing is more of a full-time occupation, effortlessly demonstrated by a Frenchwoman called “Morgane Q”, who in an article for Medium titled “I won’t date people with right-wing views”, explained: “I’m one of those people that thinks everything is political.” That can so easily degenerate into social barbarism.

In the spirit of taking the politics out of everyday social life (and the bedroom), it’s necessary to point out that for the great majority of people, however they vote, the very concepts of left and right are of little relevance or interest. And the greatest enemy of “friendliness” is judgmentalism, not any specific political party affiliation.

Perhaps that is what Grayson Perry meant. If so, he is on to something.

"Surely the fact that their accounts were different reinforces their veracity rather than diminishes it? If they had colluded in protecting ........ surely all of their accounts would be the same?" - Faithlilly

Offline Miss Taken Identity

Re: The moral superiority of the left.
« Reply #4 on: September 24, 2020, 05:26:17 PM »
As something of a Lefty myself I have to say this is bang on the money

Grayson Perry is right on the left’s bad attitude
Dominic LawsonSeptember 06 2020, 12.01am
At a convivial Christmas party last year (those were the days) I was approached by the rather wonderful Marina Wheeler. The just-divorced wife of Boris Johnson said she wanted to apologise over an argument we had had more than 20 years ago. Marina, whose family background and personal political views were more aligned with the Labour Party, had reacted sharply when I told her that people on the left tended to have the false conceit that they were nicer than those with right-of-centre political opinions. This brilliant lawyer — who has never become a Conservative, as far as I know — said she had now reconsidered, and no longer held the view that to be left wing was an indicator, in itself, of superior character, or virtue.

I wondered, but did not ask, whether her change of mind was based on any abuse her children might have received purely on account of who their father was. Because some years earlier I had been told by the wife of a member of David Cameron’s cabinet that a number of fellow parents at her children’s school had made it painfully clear they didn’t want their little ones to spend any time, socially, with the offspring of a wicked Tory.

These conversations bubbled back into my thoughts last week as I read a Radio Times interview with the cross-dressing ceramicist and former Reith lecturer Grayson Perry about his new Channel 4 series, Grayson Perry’s Big American Road Trip. Perry told his interviewer that in his encounters with the divergent elements in that nation’s culture war, “I would say the right on average are friendlier and more open”. He added that “the left is more venal and has more antipathy to the opposition than the other way round”.

He had said something similar in an interview two weeks ago with The Sunday Times, telling Decca Aitkenhead of his experiences in America: “The right, I hate to say it, are on the whole more reasonable. More open-minded, more forgiving.”

I suppose the reason Perry hated to say it is that he has long identified with the left: before the 2015 general election, declaring “I’ve been a Labour supporter my entire life”, he designed a Vote Labour tote bag.

Perry’s more recent observations, admittedly based on the highly selective and even contrived nature of made-for-TV encounters, may amount to little more than colourful anecdotage. But they are — particularly from such a source — a pointed challenge to the conventional wisdom that to be on the left is to be more caring or generous-spirited. After all, it signals that you want to pay more taxes to help the less well off: what more proof is required?

Sponsored

A forensic retort to this argument — or at least a corrective to its superficiality and moral vanity — was provided more than a decade ago by the American political scientist Arthur Brooks, in his book Who Really Cares. He found that Republicans not only gave more to charity than Democrats: they donated more blood, too. The author, not himself a Republican, asserted that “although liberal families’ incomes average 6% higher than [those of] conservative families”, the latter “gave, on average, 30% more to charity”. As one startled reviewer remarked: “The belief that liberals care more about the poor may scratch a partisan or ideological itch, but the facts are hostile witnesses.”

Brooks’s conclusion was that many on the left believed that the way they voted was sufficient demonstration of their concern for the poor and that they needed to do nothing further (regardless of whether the party they supported won power or not).

Perry also attacked what he called the “‘I/we’re so right’ snobbishness” of the American left. In UK terms, he would be talking about Guardian rather than Mirror readers. It is in the pages of The Guardian that one can see the most frequent manifestations of the notion that Conservatives are inherently the worst sort of person. Online, it has marketed T-shirts bearing the remark of Aneurin Bevan that Tories “are lower than vermin”, and it was there that Charlie Brooker wrote a column declaring that the Conservative Party “appeals exclusively to bigots, toffs, money-minded machine men … and selfish, grasping simpletons who were born with part of their soul missing.”

Brooker concluded that “to reach a more advanced stage of intellectual evolution, humankind must first eradicate the ‘Tory instinct’ from the brain.”

It’s not exactly intelligent to suggest a form of lobotomy for well over a third of the population, but Brooker is a hero to his fellow middle-class leftists — many of whom share his almost biological hatred of those of a different political affiliation. It goes some way to explaining the school-gate experiences of that cabinet minister’s wife.

Perhaps the fact that the Conservatives have been in power for so long accounts for some of this hatred. But when you keep failing to win over the public, you can end up acting as though you hate the voters, too, which is not a good look. There is an internecine element to it: there has long been, on the left, an obsession with a form of purity (in view, rather than behaviour), which has now developed into what is called “cancel culture”.

Jeremy Corbyn’s appeal was precisely to that idea of purity. But when the gay Labour MP Angela Eagle challenged his leadership in 2016, she received hundreds of “abusive, homophobic and frightening” messages from party members — and a brick thrown through the window of her constituency office.

The evidence that those on the centre-right tend to take a more tolerant view of political differences was provided last year by YouGov. It published a poll showing that a third of Labour voters would be upset if a child of theirs married a Conservative, whereas only 13% of Conservatives would be upset if one of their children married a Labour voter.

Perhaps this just illustrates the point that to be left wing is more of a full-time occupation, effortlessly demonstrated by a Frenchwoman called “Morgane Q”, who in an article for Medium titled “I won’t date people with right-wing views”, explained: “I’m one of those people that thinks everything is political.” That can so easily degenerate into social barbarism.

In the spirit of taking the politics out of everyday social life (and the bedroom), it’s necessary to point out that for the great majority of people, however they vote, the very concepts of left and right are of little relevance or interest. And the greatest enemy of “friendliness” is judgmentalism, not any specific political party affiliation.

Perhaps that is what Grayson Perry meant. If so, he is on to something.

The most glaringly interesting point to the virtue signalling marxists left. 'we are the most tolerant of the political sphere' well except for people like you, whom we hate,  because you are not tolerant of our agenda.

which makes them intolerant of other peoples views. Own goals all day long.
'Never underestimate the power of stupid people'... George Carlin

Offline Venturi Swirl

Re: The moral superiority of the left.
« Reply #5 on: October 28, 2020, 08:40:49 AM »
“Sir Keir Starmer has been in collision with a cyclist while driving an SUV to a private appointment with a tailor who caters to celebrities.”

Imagine the outrage if it had been Boris instead of Sir Keir, running down the proletariat in his SUV in his haste to get to his celebrity tailor.
"Surely the fact that their accounts were different reinforces their veracity rather than diminishes it? If they had colluded in protecting ........ surely all of their accounts would be the same?" - Faithlilly

Offline Miss Taken Identity

Re: The moral superiority of the left.
« Reply #6 on: October 28, 2020, 10:46:15 PM »
“Sir Keir Starmer has been in collision with a cyclist while driving an SUV to a private appointment with a tailor who caters to celebrities.”

Imagine the outrage if it had been Boris instead of Sir Keir, running down the proletariat in his SUV in his haste to get to his celebrity tailor.


I hope he gets 3 points for driving too close to a cyclist (the law) AND is sued for damages.

 Sir keir private tailor?  up with the red flag... designed and produced by gucci or D&G.. Just to keep it real DAHLIN

Yeah hell broke lose when bojo had the bloody audacity to have a holiday.   I missed out on some news  what did sir keir say he would do about COVID19?
'Never underestimate the power of stupid people'... George Carlin