Re: I would ask you to rethink your headline Archived Message
Posted by Sergei Kirov on May 6, 2019, 4:47 pm, in reply to "I would ask you to rethink your headline"
There is something about the psychology of contemporary middle class radicalism - in Britain and America in particular - that seeks to be seen to be as “radical” as possible, though in a way that does not come into conflict with power. In a way this is a tacit, unconscious acknowledgment by middle class radicals of the sheer authoritarianism of UK and US society post-Thatcher/Blair: the fact of the matter is that there is just very little genuine meaningful activism that people in Britain and America are now permitted to engage in, that will not fall foul of the police, or at least significantly damage your employment prospects. So Anglo-American middle class radicals typically get around this, psychologically speaking, by creating easy, winnable goals for themselves - the sort of goals that aren’t really goals at all: typically, the demand is for some sort of amorphous, undefined, unspecified “change”. There is a whole vocabulary of postmodern, managerialist jargon that has arisen out of the need to cater to precisely these sorts of psychological demands. Where middle class radicals do tend to make specific demands, again, these are demands of the easily winnable sort that are not likely to harm their own careers: typically, those who are expected to bear the brunt are the working class - i.e. those who are least able to defend themselves. Hence the propensity for middle class radicals to throw themselves into causes like the anti-smoking campaign, or for minimum unit alcohol pricing, or the demand that working class people stop saying “racist” or “sexist” or “homophobic” things. Middle class radicals populate the UK public sector management bureaucracy and dictate its policy to a worryingly and indeed almost psychotically zealous degree.
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Message Thread: | This response ↓
- Compelling evidence the XR movement is b*llocks... - Sergei Kirov May 6, 2019, 7:43 am
- Not quite compelling, S. But it surely reads like bbiz-PR-speak. The Gilets, otoh, have it bang to - Rhisiart Gwilym May 6, 2019, 9:40 am
- Re: Compelling evidence the XR movement is b*llocks... - johnlilburne May 6, 2019, 11:45 am
- See 2 posts up: the 3 goals are very clear. Unsurprising that they're maligned and more crackpotty - marknadim May 6, 2019, 1:27 pm
- I would ask you to rethink your headline - Garry May 6, 2019, 3:46 pm
- XR has a second meaning: "Extended Reality" .. - Shyaku May 7, 2019, 2:35 pm
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