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Culture War

Barrymagrec said:
I liked Kenneth Clarke , as far as Tories go, but he never made leader.
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I think the liking for Kenneth Clarke amongst pfmers is a good explanation of why he never became leader. No doubt someone will be along shortly to flag up his role in selling ciggies to third-world countries.
 
Apologies, not Ken Clarke. Definitely William Hague though still in school uniform IIRC. I was a different timeline back then. I’m trapped in this one; my comment about both being functioning adults still applies.
 
Barrymagrec said:
I liked Kenneth Clarke , as far as Tories go, but he never made leader.
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Clarke likes jazz and doesn’t like Brexit, so he can’t be entirely evil. He’s the only long-serving Tory I had any respect for. The only others I had any time for appear to have been in the party by accident, e.g. Heidi Allen, Sarah Wollaston and Rory Stewart. They should really have been Lib Dems but for some reason filled out the wrong application form. All long-since left/purged.
 
I never met Ken Clarke, but I did meet Alan Clark (no relation, obvs, though his father was called Kenneth) when I was a junior Civil Servant. He was very polite and charming, but a strange chap. He used sign his letters in green ink.
 
Joe Hutch said:
I never met Ken Clarke, but I did meet Alan Clark (no relation, obvs, though his father was called Kenneth) when I was a junior Civil Servant. He was very polite and charming, but a strange chap. He used sign his letters in green ink.
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When I was in the Civil Service only auditors were allowed green ink.
 
A few years ago I used to read the telegraph and disagree with most of it but could see that the viewpoints had some merit, now it looks to be written entirely for senile geriatrics who rail against Rhodesia being renamed Zimbabwe.
 
Cav said:
When I was in the Civil Service only auditors were allowed green ink.
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I think ministers were a rule unto themselves.

We had to check carefully before sending Clark's letters out because, when writing to fellow MPs, he would often add rude comments in handwriting below his signature; one I remember was in a letter to Austin Mitchell, when he wrote 'Austin Mitchell is a funny little man'.
 
Joe Hutch said:
As Voltaire wrote: 'we must cultivate our garden'

https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/cultivate-own-garden-voltaire/

'What did Voltaire mean with his gardening advice? That we must keep a good distance between ourselves and the world, because taking too close an interest in politics or public opinion is a fast route to aggravation and danger. We should know well enough at this point that humans are troublesome and will never achieve – at a state level – anything like the degree of logic and goodness we would wish for. We should never tie our personal moods to the condition of a whole nation or people in general; or we would need to weep continuously. We need to live in our own small plots, not the heads of strangers.'
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It's a good thought, although I disagree with the implied cynicism about what can be achieved at the state level (and, as a beneficiary of universal education and free healthcare, so should you). The point about, essentially, taking care of one's mental health is nicely put, and has been much dicussed on the left:

https://medium.com/@christinejanebe...n-letter-to-the-post-corbyn-left-e1e78cb775b8

I'm an optimist by nature but I've been struggling with low moods since December. It's hard not to see the last election as a turning point, every bit as significant as 1979. Unfortunately, the UK's decision was to turn further to the hard right, with tragic consequences.
 
russel said:
A few years ago I used to read the telegraph and disagree with most of it but could see that the viewpoints had some merit, now it looks to be written entirely for senile geriatrics who rail against Rhodesia being renamed Zimbabwe.
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It has basically become the Boris fan club magazine, with Allison 'why oh why' Pearson as de facto editor. With the Barclay family locked in a courtroom fight to the death, and sales crashing, its days are probably numbered.
 
droodzilla said:
I'm an optimist by nature but I've been struggling with low moods since December. It's hard not to see the last election as a turning point, every bit as significant as 1979. Unfortunately, the UK's decision was to turn further to the hard right, with tragic consequences.
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Age has probably got a lot to do with my relatively sanguine outlook. Thinking back, I was only dimly aware of the Cuban missile crisis, but clearly my parents were very worried about it. By contrast, the 1980s nuclear war paranoia ('Edge of Darkness' etc) mostly passed me by, because I was busy buying a house, starting a family and so forth, but people who were in their teens at the time have told me they were unable to sleep at night through worrying that the world was about to end. However, 9/11 affected my mental mood badly, because I had young-ish children, and was worried about a wave of terrorist attacks which, thankfully, never arrived.
 
droodzilla said:
Someone on Twitter shared them.
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That's a huge part of the problem, right there. Twitter is good for funny videos of cats. For politics, it's basically a huge echo chamber, where, in the words of Buffalo Springfield, most of the messages consist of 'Hooray for our side'.
 
TBH all political discourse for general public consumption operates in echo chambers — be it the Internet, Dead Tree Media, (inc. books, papers, the pamphlets shoved thru doors to line the litter tray with), Rallies, Conferences, Think Tanks, I cannot think of a single publication or entity that does not start out with mission statements of impartiality & end up slopping up polemic & partisan op-eds. The problem is not the echo chamber, it is our inability to realise there is no escaping the echo chamber because political discourse cannot exist without it. It needs it, it only functions with it.
 
The only alternative is to be a wishy-washy fence-sitter.

Years ago, my then-girlfriend and her father were discussing fox-hunting. She was against, he was for. The argument got quite heated, and they both turned to me, with 'What do you think?' and I did my usual 'Well, on the one hand X and on the other hand Y' Blah blah blah, to which her father responded 'I'm going to cut off those effing hands in a minute! What do you actually think?'
 
claire.foxx said:
TBH all political discourse for general public consumption operates in echo chambers .
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There was something I heard on the radio, some university man who'd done some research on this. What he found was that people experience less of an echo chamber in social media is than in real life.

In real life, he said, we often choose our friends according to whether there's a basis of shared opinion. People tend to exclude people whose values and attitudes and beliefs are far from their own.

But on public internet media, your fundamental views can get challenged, and you might find yourself drawn into a discussion with someone very different from you.
 
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