In a broad way like a chameleon but I always have a trace of outsider. I've been everywhere but do not completely fit anywhere, and I was a strange kid who got on well with chess club and the lads who beat them up. I soon get bored of hanging around with just leavers or just remainers, with just men or with just women, with just poor voices or with just posh voices for me it gets a little samey. I do imitate my surroundings but I prefer to bring a touch of class to the rough as arseholes, and I prefer to bring the common touch to the sperglords of political correctness
It's a return to ignorance because it is a burden to think for yourself. It's no surprise that the Queen bounces back to popularity as we are told what to think and what to feel on Instagram. This is the dumbing down. Scientific scepticism is being replaced by the emotionally suggestible in a wholesale decline of IQ that correlates with the bounceback of the queen and the rising power of image in general. For the typical person the outside world is looking increasingly strange and unnerving and they're going to be doubling down on their idols.
Maybe at one time it was different. But in this day and age the royalists are not noble and the religious are not pious. I still think the reason that the Queen bounced back to popularity is postmodernism a certain spite towards the modern world rather than duty and an age of discipline. Spite is a strong word could just be boredom, boredom with a world of reason and maturity that makes the queen popular along with the spiders webs and the magic, the Windsor brand and the Hocus pocus is all part of the second religiousness the turn against rationalism, but it's not honourable like it was a deep belief.
And the final reason for free speech on the run is the women. Women now exercise their right to vote and they often earn more money and this promotes politesse in society. Women decrease the tolerance of hearing and seeing ugly things and free speech is supported by the ugly, by the people who are NOT going to be agreed with by default but those disagreed with by default. The actual underdog supports free speech because he has to, it's the only way to talk as free as those with power and influence. It's that those who are disagreed with, those who are disliked, are still allowed to speak. Those who are agreed with anyway, regardless of what they say, will by and large oppose free speech.
I myself attribute my affection for liberal democracy down to being a Thatcher baby, but I'm not a big fan of Maggie it's just that Thatcher millennials are least likely to want the country run by a type of Pinochet. Or a Pinochet that puts artificial intelligence in charge the whole world run like air traffic control. I just think that Thatcher babies have this touch of practicality and self-reliance than the altogether more authoritarian children born under Tony Blair even though the Blair years were in a sense less conservative and more affluent, more privileged, more protected. The youth that grew up under Blair have such a hard time adapting to new conditions and they dream of Pinochet and air traffic control anything to make life as easy as it can be. And they're daft to do so.
The baby boomers had a liberalising effect on society but a baby boom is not liberal. And what happens now is a counter-culture that stands against the 1960s. The old score a double victory but it's a victory against themselves, they are reversing what they stood for in the 1960s and they're going to win. It's the baby boom itself that gives youth a future only through that conservatism can the young defeat the old one day. Only be creating a young and healthy population like a conservative - that doesn't get sent to die in a war unlike a conservative - can liberalism take hold.
And this is the paradox of liberalism it must from time to time be renewed by people who grow up and know how to breed.
The paradox of liberalism is as much as it about new ways ever free it nevertheless creates a population of old farts that snuff out the chance of newness. It's so ridiculously old that it could not change at all the paradox of liberalism is forgetting how to breed as though being seriously immature for your age is going to make up for being the same people alive forever. Liberalism refutes itself it inevitably aborts itself and it has to be renewed by down to earth people - immigrants for example, the working class basically anyone conventionally human that does the things humanity always did - at least to some extent, the abortionist and the thousand year life really cannot be new ways it's impossible.
Basically put liberalism has become very much working class and it's working class values that suggest 17 is an adult and 60 is an old fart.
But the 60 is the new 40, the 27 year old child, the people who don't get a job until a third of their adult life has gone are the values of the middle class. And it's a profoundly illiberal state of arrested development to be so old without any life experience
And the higher education, too, of course. In contrast to the past university increases support for fascism because its such a self-destructive act that lowers the chance of ever owning your own home considerably. What higher education does has gone into reverse, it's illiberal and poverty-inducing.
The free society would be more like the past. You had a part time job as a teenager, you got drunk with your mates, and you left school at 16 to enter the adult world at work. Ironically this choice of life now creates the more liberal outcome the one where you grow up sooner rather than later.
My take on freedom of speech is that it's chaotic and upsetting and it can only be done so long as we have friends. But the problem is we don't because the internet and helicopter parents increase support for fascism amongst the young. The concept of a 17 year old "child" increases fascism because the fascism is a product of an infantilised world. Free speech and democracy is about letting go, trust and allowing people to socialize as normal rather than fencing them in like a toddler.
The money and the power, the positions of authority and with an aging population that has nothing better to do than turn up and vote - the main focus of political society. If there's a flu going around, society will shut itself down. The young perish and the old linger.
Because it's dumb to be offended by someone who insults your nation particularly when they're right. You or I don't have to be stereotypically English because we are from England particularly when being English is itself about individuality. You can burn as many British flags as you like so long as you've paid for them, so long as you have paid for them these are not British flags you are burning your own flag.
Or the Muslim grooming gangs. Nothing was said about them until Islam became more unpopular on the right than it is fashionable for leftists. The truth is that there isn't any justice in this world there is only the power to enforce your will, and this makes it important for power to change hands on the regular.
At the end of day jimmy was stopped by a new generation coming through with no skin of the game. Same as the Catholic church. The truth came out once the excuses for the fact you ever liked them melted away. Although there'll be different blind spots now based on what's popular today.
Anyway I'm glad you get two thumbs up because it proves how Jimmy got away with it for so long. Seeing someone in the media is completely different to giving up your trust to them and letting them into your life, something this obvious should be clear even to you.
Seeing someone on tv is not really what letting someone into your life means. Letting them into your life is like you'd leave your kids alone with them.
I don't remember when Life of Brian came out it was before I was born, but that was the peak of the western enlightenment the most intelligent we'll ever be. For a movie like that to have been popular is a humanity outdoing itself compared to all of human history. Men will always say that Life of Brian was our finest hour intellectually, and it's been downhill ever since.
At the end of the day we have to make a compromise because that generation of David Bowie and Monty Python failed to achieve a society of individuals. And Karl Marx who thought the founding fathers of America were heroes had his own ideology fail in practice. Marxism in theory is extremely liberal but in practice it was anything but, and ever since it failed we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater in a wholesale rejection of the enlightenment. Not very long ago we were told to think for ourselves, but today we promote influencers who are the antithesis of thinking for yourself.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Some applaud the royals like mad for being a normal human being and others condemn that saying she's actually a lizard. It could be a moral 5 out of 10 we'll still get the same extreme take on things. Medals for doing what anybody could have done or an excruciating death for doing what anybody would have done. On the one hand ignorant pigs who give medals for not being an ignorant pig, people who are easily, if not selectively, impressed and then the reverse people who are easily, if not selectively, spiteful. That moral 5 has to be somehow a 0 or a 10 when it is a 5.
And Charles abdicating to William would be the best way to avoid the scenes we are seeing in America where the best man cannot possibly succeed. American ambition reached where everything is cheating, or perceived to be cheating, Charles doing the right thing is perhaps the only way to fend off America's screw up your brother or he'll get you in the end.
Which is the benefit of nobility in terms of the birthright. No careerist or status-seeker would fall on their own sword to let the best man win because it's too ambitious. But with royalty people come to power who do not necessarily lust for power. It's a lottery in that sense the next in line to the throne could be any personality. At the top of business and politics all personalities are basically the same ambitious/corrupt type, the ignoble.
It really doesn't get much more noble than falling on your sword so that the best man wins. Nobility isn't a position and place in society it's a moral character. That's what distinguishes nobility from simply being famous or powerful - to do the right thing for no other reason than being the right thing to do. Louis XIV was wrong when he said "I am the state", and Frederick the Great was right when he said "I am the first servant of the state".
ChesneyChrist Forum Posts (7,144)
RE: galrads appears to AWOL
Happy to hear you're still with us, Galrads. I've been throwing up from concern