i don't know if the two are connected. I don't believe trump was elected as an anti liberal pc free for all world. I think he was elected cos he was not a political establishment figure who talked about making the lives of those he targeted better. He sang a good song to west Virginians about coal mines for example. he stood up in Michigan and Pennsylvanian and told them their jobs would return etc etc etc. I really believe half the idiots who excused his sexual deviancy as "locker room talk" only did so as they didn't want to hear it. had a rubio or christie been found to be such a predator they would have been run out of town. No these people attacked clinton for not dumping bill rather than discuss trump cos they want ed trump for different reasons. I do not doubt that a sizeable number of bigots and racists are very happy in the us as a result. but i can't beleive there was enough of them to actually make this about PC.
I agree. cheap booze and blind eyes to certain drugs and usage so places like the cheese keep the plebs in line. you are dead right. thats why the dole exists. not to get people up on their feet after something bad happens but they paid in and now we help them.. not its there to keep the kilroy classes down. just enough to keep them in drink and smokes and a tv in front of them while they churn out more kilroys.... and this is the types that the brexiters appealed to.
I asked this because I read somewhere that people are blaming PC for Trump's election and that at some early stage in his campaign he declared war on the whole concept.
The problem is that most people are simply interested in (things) getting better, offer nothing and there's always someone who will take advantage.
The reason I asked for your definition is that I find people these days use the term PC to include a whole load of rules and restrictions that they deem petty or irrelevant. The original idea of restricting certain words or phrases that are insulting to whole groups has been hi-jacked to a degree. If we're using the original meaning, I find it amazing that people would elect Trump on a platform of being able to call a spade a spade again. The point is that Trump doesn't merely say that, for instance, Mexicans are dirty foreigners and that women are fair-game sex objects, he treats them as though they are - and that becomes an issue far more important than the right to call people names.
you know enough of them joined the brexit vote to got 66% turn out in GE to give cameron an overall majority which was unexpected and then 72% voted for brexit one way or the other. that little bit extra is enough to turn a dead heat GE turnout was 65 per cent in 2010, 61 per cent in 2005 and only 59 per cent in 2001. at least its a positive trend. You cannot say that poepel did not engage or ake it seriously here By contrast in america only 55% turned out which was lowest since clinton himself won his second term in 1996. interesting as a % of votes 26.3% chose trump and bill.. exactly the same percentage. but in 1996 bob dole lost the popular vote. this is a 8% drop in voters form when obama was first elected. This all suggests (PERHAPS) that brexit engaged people while the us election forced them away. also interestingly bush, mccain and romey (2 losers) got more votes than trump did so does that suggest in a different campaign trump would lose i nthe primaries?
It has and unfortunately and people like Trump are taking advantage of the way that being PC is used today as almost a negative thing.
I think the Brexit & Trump votes show that we as Western countries aren't as advanced and open minded as some would have us believe. The silent majority, at least.
Democracy is about the will of the people and I think that's right that they choose their rulers. And that the Americans had the right to choose Trump as their president and that choice should be respected. But please don't anyone ever say that the people is always right. That is now so evidently untrue that no rational person can argue against it. The president elect has been deemed uniquely unqualified to be president and that hasn't changed after the election. He has been the subject of thousands of lawsuits from individuals and corporations. He gas been found to be a liar, a racist, a bigot and believes that with money you are and should be able to do anything you like e.g groping a woman without her consent. Sounds president material? All he said " America needs change" "let's make America great again " and he gets the vote even though he has not even once given any evidence of how he could do it. Another clear example is Brexit. We needed to weigh out the pros and cons of the change. But all the Brexiteers had to do was to say" we'll give £350m to the NHS" "we need to control immigration " and the people choose to believe the rhetoric. Irrespective of the rational economic or political arguments
And I hope that we people in the west stop denigrating the people in the developing world in choosing so called unsuitable dictators time and time again. The people of the USA and the UK are no better and have no right to be on their high horses. Not ever again.
As you say Democracy isn't so much about the people being right, more the people get the govt that they deserve. Yes, as an individual, the result may seem unfair if it goes against you but that's part of the contract you accept living under such as system. the continual bonus is the freedom not to live under said system. Many people around the world don't have even that basic freedom. As for what appears to be a reaction to "elites" or "establishment" or whatever label we choose to use. I think it's a reaction to a long period of centrist politics. people start to feel there is no distinct choice to be made , that it's democracy in name only. As someone said earlier it moves in cycles. A real Democracy lasts and progresses if it survives wrong choices as much as it enjoys correct choices. On the "pc" discussion earlier, I think it's more a feeling resentment towards being made to feel continually guilty for "the sins of our fathers"..with the exceptions of the unabashed racist or misogynist most people consider themselves fair minded people. Unfortunately (imo) special interest groups have become self perpetuating businesses that have to constantly find reasons to keep existing. They are now at the minutiae stage of the battle..unconscious bias etc..This is the tricky part. How to explain this to the once dominant culture without it sounding like it's moved into continual punishment or revenge. most people can understand such concepts and not see it as a personal attack others just see it as nothing is ever good enough. Things like "cultural appropriation" for example... imo this is a nonsense idea that does nothing other than produce a negative reaction. All culture has been appropriated..either from older generations of a sub group or from contact with other sub groups..yes; that contact may have been enforced through imperialism etc or from admiration once viewed. It's a balancing act..making sure minority cultures retain an identity while not sounding like they want to become dominant rather than viewed on an equal footing. As I say, imo some special interest groups muddy the waters with over the top accusations rather than focus on maintaining the real progress that has been made. At this stage there is as much responsibility on minority groups as dominant to tread carefully and not end up with reversals through miscommunication.
As Churchill once said, democracy is the worst system in the world - apart from all the others. Just suck it up, as we did during the 80's with Reagan and thatcher, for them days are coming back. I think a war against a relatively small, unaligned nation is on the cards, obviously without the means to defend themselves by nuclear weapons. If you rule out Commonwealth countries, it has to be Latin American. Uruguay this time? Peru?
One thing that is becoming truer with each election/referendum is this: The pollsters "scientific " surveys are worth less than the cost of a roll of toilet paper. They got everything from the results of general elections, referendum, presidential elections wrong. Why? Because they cannot factor in the liars. No pollster can and will ever be able to work out how many of the people they survey are lying to them.
Been thinking about this so much in the last couple of days, partly because my own political alignment seems to be all over the place like a geiger counter on acid, and partly because my wife just gave birth to my second child and I am not sleeping so well, so have had lots of time to mull this over...... Let me start by telling you a little about my political background (or lack thereof, until a couple of years ago). My mums family is full of UKIP supporters, and my dad was a sweetheart, one of the kindest men you would ever meet. He was also a supporter of the BNP. Now straight away that has ****ed with some of your brainwaves "BNP?, kindest man you will ever meet?....barrgggghhhh". I was deeply disappointed when I found this out about my father, he was definitely not racist, at least not to my knowledge, he had black and Greek friends, he ran a pub and I never saw him refuse entry to anyone, look down on anyone or be horrible to anybody in that way....so naturally my thought process was something akin to yours right now reading this....."Da fuq?!" At this point, this was my early 20's, I couldn't have given a rats ass about politics. Blair, Brown etc, these were all just people on my TV. Nothing they said or did ever had any effect on me.......I was nothing to them and they were nothing to me..... Then something changed. My first daughter was born. Around this time I started to become alarmed with the amount of footage released on the internet of US cops shooting and killing unarmed minorities, and through investigation of these incidents I found a Youtube channel called "The Young Turks". https://www.youtube.com/user/TheYoungTurks Essentially a left wing, progressive Internet news network, covering global issues from the liberal perspective. And I was sucked in.....I bought it wholesale. I argued with family members over all kinds of ****. Pensions, racism, socialist issues, Social, financial and gender equality. I felt righteous. And I felt angry when I saw what I perceived as injustice, wherever I may find it. And I took to doing what they do on the Young Turks and in fact what a lot of left wing libs do these days......I attacked the Right Wing. After all, they were Right Wing....they must all be Pro Gun, Anti Abortion, homophobic and against Gender Equality etc. If there is anything the last 6 months has taught me it's this....The Left can be worse. They come from a place of goodness, and of well meaning, but then in their zeal to promote equality, some of them can border of fascism. "That's not right.....you WILL see things our way. It's the only way to go". A lot of what I feel is covered in the video I posted earlier, and in some of the posts I put on the EU debate thread, but I will repeat myself here. Its gone too far. We have outlawed racism and homophobia! Now again, your first thought is "Good!!", but no, in my opinion, not good at all. Basically what you are doing is telling someone that what they feel, or what they believe in, is inherently evil and against the law, and because they think this, they must be punished. Not educated, but insulted, labeled and punished. Take the example I set the other day. I punch someone because he is fat, with no prior record, I get charged with assault and given 6 months probation. I punch someone because he is black, with no prior record, I get charged with "Racially aggravated assault" and given 2 years in prison. I punch someone because he is gay, with no prior record, I get charged with a "Hate crime" and sentenced to 2 years in prison. See what's happened there? Same crime, but because the initial motivating factor behind the assault was different, the punishment changes. And this isn't the fault of minorities, or black people, or Right Wingers. It's left wingers, hard lefties that have done this. Now, given what I have just said, do you think a racist, if he is charged with racial assault and sentenced to two years in prison, will see the light and become unracist? Or see for himself that because the victim was blacked, his sentence was increased, confirming, in his mind, his racist rhetoric, that they are given special treatment and exalted above the majority and become angry, hateful, resentful, and double down on his current beliefs... Which do you think is most likely? When Right wing minded folk speak up they are shot down. Because the cultural war was won by us (The left), and it is no longer acceptable to be homophobic, racist or misogynistic (rightly so), we feel that gives us a license to secrete our views everywhere, as rigid, unbendable and uncompromising gospel. And anyone who does not agree is scum ,or racist etc. If someone speaks out with a view we do not like, they are immediately insulted, mocked and shunned. Where does this leave them? We have blocked them from ever coming left with our self righteousness, so where can they go....only place they can....to the Right. Yes there is Right wing press (Mail etc), but as I mentioned earlier. You know who the only people are who read Right wing press? Right Wingers! Do you know who the only people who read left wing press are? Left Wingers. In terms of converting or enlightening anyone, they are useless and serve no purpose, for both sides, except to push a narrative their readers have already swallowed, hook, line and sinker. Also if we give Extreme Right wingers the means to get their point across on TV, they will expose their own follies, take Nick Griffin on Question time, showed the whole world what a **** he was, and it effectively ended his career. If we try to silence anyone with thoughts that differ from ours, then that just makes you fascist! I think it is time the extreme left realised that fervour of that intensity does not help our cause, quite the opposite, it hinders it. By all means be passionate, no one will argue against you for that, some will even admire you for it. But the day we tell everyone that its our way, or the highway, and damn your ****ing soul if you do not agree, is the day the Left will truly lose. With Trump as the next President, the Tories in charge here, and facing a forthcoming Brexit.....we need to be as united as ever, to debate, to talk, to get our views across in ways that enlighten and excite, not shun and insult. Long post and its 2am, im gonna attempt to sleep.
About twenty years ago I remember this documentary on race with Darcus Howe. He went to a working men's club somewhere up here in the north, a real Wheeltappers and Shunters place. Oh how they all agreed with him and were friends - you could almost hear Matin Luther's speech of children walking hand in hand together, and so forth. They kept the cameras rolling for a couple of hours after he went, and after several more bevvies were consumed. Then it started - and the women were worse than the men. Our next door neighbour in Finch Lane never did a day's work to my knowledge from the day he moved in in early 70's until he died last year. Lovely bloke, like your dad. He, however, was a Tory/UKIP/BNP voter all his life. Why? 'Labour let all the nig-nogs in'. And, of course, he could never get a job because of them. Look, all this 'left behind by globalisation' thing is done to death. Of course it's true, and nowhere more so in coal, steel and manufacturing towns that can't understand why why we still import all this stuff at half the price. My dad, an educated man and former senior manager, worked at Courtauld's in Aintree in the 70's as a shop steward. The company applied for EU handouts for new equipment, that they got (millions of pounds of upgraded looms and suchlike) that never got out of their packing cases before the Aintree factory was closed down and the new equipment shipped to spain where labour was half the price. Despite my dad trying to tell his colleagues of the dire effects of globalisation and neoliberal economics the view from the shopfloor was '****ing EEC -as it was - and ****ing Spics'. I say this now and, despite being of the Left, I'm consistent and have said it all my life: I have total sympathy and passionate support for our poor and swindled underclass, especially de-industrialised areas. What I have no sympathy for though is the pig-ignorant blaming on other people because they are different in some way to their tribe instead of blaming the real culprits. They're just ****ing peasants and Mail-Murdoch fodder, and it's totally patronising to indulge them further.
People vote with their gut not their brain. How else do you explain more women voting for Trump than Romney? People of that Welsh town so reliant on European Union funds yet voting overwhelmingly for Brexit? The people of Sunderland so reliant on Nissan who had pleaded with their workers to vote remain as their cars are dependent on the single market? The people of Boston decrying the foreign workers there yet are so dependent on the foreign labour force for their basic services? Trump, Brexiteers and Tories assumed that the people were unthinking idiots and promised anything and went for emotional arguments and people basest instincts. And they were right and they won. I don't want ever to hear that the electorate in the USA and the U.K are more sophisticated compared to those in say Thailand or Ghana or anywhere else in the developing world. If they can vote Trump as their leader and representative then any one can aspire to any position in the world. Yes, the Americans couldn't give two hoots about the world but that doesn't mean that the world has not suddenly become a more unsafe place by their electing someone so unsuitable.
