Wednesday 22 June 2011

Left and Right = Public Sector vs Private Sector?

It seems to me that these days the left versus right divide, at least in the economic realm, is increasingly about public versus private sector employment.

Or to be more comprehensive, membership of a state funded client group versus non membership. But I think the narrower definition is more telling in terms of the tenor of public debate; a middle class exchange between two sets of workers who perceive themselves to be penalised by one form of government or the other.

The left long ceased to be much to do with the working class - in fact is actively hostile to it's interests, preferring by accident or design to cultivate it's client groups to the detriment of the bases of working class self sufficiency. More on that another time.

Despite this, Labour has continued to hold power in it's historic heartlands. No doubt tradition and inertia play a part in this, but these places are also often heavily reliant on state employment (as well  government funding generally). The working class in other regions do not seem bound by the loyalties of the past; a past which sometimes seems indeed like a foreign country.

So the question is; is the economic battleground no longer between classes (if it ever was) but between those who the state pays, and those who pay for the state?

Monday 20 June 2011

'Liberalism' to authoritarianism in three easy steps

This pattern is repeated so frequently that I sometimes wonder whether it is simple stupidity
or something more malign;

1. Attack the values, taboos, and traditions through which society self regulates -
if those have an institutional embodiment, target that with special vigour

2. Watch things fall apart

3. Impose laws to contain the situation you have created

Wednesday 8 June 2011

Abortion, sexism and lunacy

There are some times where the orthodoxy of the day plumbs such depths of incoherence it is hard to know where to begin.

Can there be a better example than the confusion encountered by liberal sorts when confronted by the issue of abortion motivated by gender selection?

As I commented on this Guardian thread - which is a carnival of all the confused, angry and incoherent tropes of the right-on collapsing under the weight of their internal contradictions - "The idea that a foetus has no right not to be killed, but has a right to be protected from sexism is truly some kind of nadir of addled pc 'liberalism'."

There is no doubt a longer post in this; the subject of abortion is one dominated by pseudo-science, argument shifting, non-sequiturs, logical fails, biological ignorance, and quasi religious redefinitions of reality itself. In short, fashionable nonsense par excellence.

But that's for another day...