Comments by "dixon pinfold" (@dixonpinfold2582) on "OxfordUnion"
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@robertburns3605 Neither British nor living in the UK, I cannot make a comment about Question Time, but I spend some time watching political coverage on Channel 4 and Sky. Overall the tone is as follows: A Conservative minister or member is addressed with clear skepticism (this much is quite all right in my view) and antagonism verging on hostility. Interruptions are frequent and rude. Had Scruton extended his reference concerning humiliation to Channel 4, he would have been justified. Anyone hating conservatives or Conservatives must find the attempts at it, which regularly succeed, deeply satisfying to his or her hatred.
A Labour member or shadow minister is addressed in a manner much closer to that one uses with a colleague, even a friend at certain times. Skepticism may make an appearance but on the whole it is ordinarily a skepticism bordering on curiosity ("I'm not convinced; let us explore this further.") It is usually absent altogether, as are antagonism and hostility. The whole tone is very close to what a Labour guest would ask for if invited to do so.
In short, Conservatives are treated much as foreign enemies of the UK might be. Were they really foreign enemies, we would all like it. Labour representatives are treated, not as perfect, but nonetheless clearly the way defenders of the nation against foreign enemies might be.
In this way, supporters of the Conservatives who are watching are made to feel as though they are possibly foreigners themselves in some sense, but certainly at any rate enemies of the nation.
It is this sort of display of power which most thoroughly makes ridiculous any claim that conservatism is responsible for society's ills, by demonstrating that its opponents are the ones firmly in charge. The media, the TV media at any rate, have set themselves up as a sort of a third house of parliament with a permanent left majority. When a Conservative government is in power, they must accommodate themselves to the demands of this third chamber, which is always in session with members standing to speak.
'Just doing their job,' you might reply, with a certain amount of justification. That justification, in my view, falls short at the point where the media are participants in a battle which they are supposed to be covering. If they were to leave the battle and return to the impartial stance Scruton asserts they once had, they would remain rightly powerful of course, but their virtual parliamentary innovation would disappear in an instant, its arrogated power shifted back to the Commons, the cabinet, and Downing Street.
These are the views of a foreigner quite sympathetic to the future of Britain, who has no home anywhere on the political spectrum but rather always finds himself a nomad, pitching tents somewhere within a stone's throw from the centre (perhaps occasionally two) on either side of it.
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1:00:15 The questioner, making a show of disrespect that surely played well with all her friends, taxes Scaramucci with hypocrisy for esteeming party loyalty whilst decrying political division. She does it with a rudeness scarcely possible to attain without one's considering oneself rather wonderful and indisputably righteous. Fellow audience members acted in a similar, for me regrettable, way. But as I'm not on Scaramucci's side politically, it was for other reasons that I cringed and felt disappointed for all those present to witness it.
I invite anyone to speculate whether she would have been the least bit critical of another speaker taking the same stance were she fully congenial to his or her politics. My own speculation is that, no, had such a speaker said that division threatens us gravely, but we of the left, we women, we feminists, progressives, etc. must stand together, her rejoinder to Mr. Scaramucci would never have crossed her mind.
It's not easy to feel sorry for her, for I think she'll have an easy time of carrying on in this manner for some years, perhaps decades. In our times, loathsome and pitiable as she may strike us at certain moments, she is actually much to be envied in many ways.
I well remember my own hypocrisy during my youth. The trait is endemic in the young, for hypocrisy is on sale at a deep discount for a number of years following the onset of adolescence, in the anglosphere of the present lifetime anyway. Going easy on oneself, which is what hypocrisy amounts to, has many attractions, until at last its costs catch up with you. The sooner that happens the better.
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@miguelurdaci7884 Thanks for your reply.
What sort of prop? On the whole it looks like the sort of coat he would have acquired a taste for whilst riding the elevator, decked out himself in a barn jacket of the type he nearly always favours, up to Goldman Sachs on cold mornings long ago. Investment bankers wear that sort of garment with considerable (often revolting) dignity, and sometimes panache. But he abjured the Goldman ethos long ago.
The effect of his leaving it on, like that of eliding so many letters and syllables, was to impress upon me a severe lack of couth. Not what you want with an Oxford Union audience unless you enjoy antagonizing them (and if you do, why not go just a little further and wear a MAGA cap?).
Then again, maybe he was truly worried he'd have to flee an invading storm of hooligans with so little warning that it seemed incautious to take the coat off lest he lose it.
(And if, lastly, he had no such worry and merely wanted to give off that air, it lumps him in with the men who at other times and places would wear a beret to make it seem they might have to tangle with fascists or police on the way home from the café or International Socialists meeting.
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@4everBroadwayfan Thanks, but that party membership number doesn't help much. Which is ok, I can find out what I want to know without much trouble.
You give off something that tells me Orwell's non-fiction would be your kind of thing. As a man who embraced Marxism (up to a point but not thoroughly) then dumped it, he takes you through his deliberations (though not always in so many words) .
The essays, first of all, then Down and Out in London and Paris, then Road to Wigan Pier, but read them in any order you like.
(Animal Farm and 1984 are to Orwell's best work what T.S. Eliot's The Book of Practical Cats is to The Waste Land, Four Quartets, and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock---more famous, not as good.)
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The same thought resides permanently in my mental foreground. Life, society, politics, philosophy, religion and all the rest are about little more than what human nature is, and how much we ought to restrain the bits of it which cause trouble in groups (ones large enough and settled enough to go by the name civilization).
Not enough renunciation of our natures, and misery multiplies owing to our apish elements and how unsuited they are to present arrangements. It leads straight to things such as murder, rape and slavery. Too much, and misery multiplies because over-restraint amounts to a savaging of elements of ourselves which we will never root out, any attempt to do so being thus a dumb error.
To fancy that through laws, schools, priests, regulations, prisons and so on, we can approximate ethereal beings—the utopian aim is nothing less—is the grossest delusion conceivable. You could call it sub-adult. It leads straight to things like hair-shirts, to Aztec holy men in front of crowds, ripping out the beating hearts of poor victims, to Soviet gulags, to the beatings in the street by which hundreds of thousands died in the Cultural Revolution. (Estimates run as high as two million.) Less dramatically, the delusion leads also to soul-sickness, disorders of personality, and simple maladjustments both small and large which we call mental illness.
It's much calmer in the centre.
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