For three decades ‘libdemmery’ has set the political and policy agenda in the UK, moderating the worst excesses of socialists and greens while indulging all the worst of California’s cults
I'm a passive Lib Dem member. The membership are still our last hope to legalise khat again, other recreationals, smoking with consent, and permit the sharing of premises for the sale of sex. So I'm still a paid up member.
But I was gobsmacked to receive this in an email from the local party saluting the LD candidates that had lost "They have all done us proud and deserved a more just result." The very notion that there is a thing called results justice. Haiyaa.
Razor sharp. This is every single one of my dad's friends in leafy, neat and tidy, NIMBY, electric vehicle-owning semi-rural Derbyshire. Bed-blocking larger families from moving up the property ladder into their increasingly difficult to maintain empty nest four and five-beds, these retirees wring their hands over whether solar panels from China or dates from Israel are a morally defensible purchase, before driving to Waitrose in their EV to pick up their sauvignon in time for Gardener's World.
I hate to break it to you, but the intellectual tradition of the modern social justice theory movement was spawned in Europe.
We enthusiastically consumed it and spread it like peanut butter all over everyone and everything.
But let's be clear. It's all from France, Germany, Italy, etc. This stuff all comes from Europe and you should know it. Foucault, Derrida, deMan, Marcuse, Adorno, Fanon, Gramsci, etc. And their intellectual progenitors, Marx and Hegel.
I thought Foucault was bad enough- the father-hating Luciferian intellect which spawned the belief that mental illness was simply an intolerance of eccentricity, leading to the destruction of mental illness institutions- when we now know that most mental illnesses (distinct from mental health issues) are the result of physiological brain dysfunction. That being said, the concept of the panopticon is highly salient to the modern age- although in terms of luxury belief signalling and hall monitoring social enforcement it would be more accurate to argue many eyes rather than one.
Then I encountered Marcuse, and the more I learn about him the more I despise the man. He literally invented the to-the-right of Stalin playbook, designed to lump together the centre with the 'far' right as a means of destabilising the previously reasonable middle ground- although as a side effect it also created mass cowardice. He was also wrong about sexual repression in healthy adults- it's the new puritans and socialist countries which seem to produce hordes of unremitting virgins.
Finally there is Franz Fanon. He literally invented modern Islamic Terrorism- which more people seemed to know back in the noughties. Google might tell you that Sartre only advocated violence against colonialism, but this is simply not the case. He supported violence as a unifying force for groups seeking to combat the alienation of capitalist societies, which is presumably why he wrote the preface to The Wretched of the Earth. So anyway, British Librarians and other institutional apparatchik are using the work of the inventor of Islamic Terrorism to justify the destruction of British culture, and rebranding all of Western history as uniquely evil.
Imagine being naive enough to believe one could mobilise militant Islam in order to usher in the glorious revolution, and then easily dismiss and discard it after the event. The inevitability of Iran is a lesson the Left never seems to learn.
The Jordan Peterson episode with Dr Paul Kengor is well-worth a watch. Marx's favourite quote from Mephistopheles was that "Everything that exists deserves to perish." Family and intimates referred to Marx as Mephistopheles. Little wonder he gulled the so many in the world into a Faustian deal which never delivers.
Perhaps Foucault objected to the panopticon, a progressive invention, because he resented the idea of mutual behavioural policing in general. As the son of a wealthy family, he expected the privilege of behaving exactly how he wished to at all times.
True, but I also think he believed Western capitalist societies were uniquely oppressive. Sure, they’re oppressive- all societies are- but they also happen to be the least oppressive societies in history (at least when one considers the alternative, state of nature oppression).
I forgot Rousseau, the enlightenment cuckoo, responsible for more damage done to education than any other source. He actually believed that the enlightenment was a movement from contract to status, rather than status to contract. Talk about 360 ideological blinders!
There is great Stanley Baldwin source on Sir Henry Maine. Here it is:
It’s just the first paragraph that I was interested in. What is it about Victorian Jurists? Lord Moulton was another one. His speech to the Authors Club on the Domain of Obedience to the Unenforceable warns us about exactly where we are today. He was emphatic that manners (political correctness) should never be legislated.
I would add Thomas Szasz and R.D. Laing to Foucault when casting blame for the collapse of mental health institutions. But also many of the mainstream psychiatrists themselves, whose treatments of the mentally ill, such as lobotomy and electro-convulsive 'therapy', did nothing for the reputation of the profession.
Hmm. That's a bit like saying we got the banjo from Africa, conveniently forgetting the minstrel shows, hillbilly and Pete Seeger. The intellectual tradition tradition may have been spawned in Europe, but it largely came to us through American universities and their, erm, spawn.
Perhaps. But you're talking about the instrument and I'm talking about the music. That's where the banjo metaphor falls apart. The typewriter is more apt.
The problem is that nearly every piece of critical theory work in American humanities for the last 40 years quotes these guys directly. Over and over and over. I lived it. The humanities became corrupted by it throughout.
I think the route was via the USA because of the English translations made there in the 1990s and 2000s, when people were discovering this retro esoteric stuff online, having dropped classical Marxism in 1989 with the uprisings against it in both Europe and China. For example Simulacra and Simulation was originally published in 1981, but the English translation not until 1994.
Perhaps it was not just a question of very few British people studying original works in French, German, or Italian, but also that these works didn't find much of a British audience in the 1960s or 1970s because the time wasn't right for them. An exception being Foucault's 1961 book on madness which was published in English in 1965 by the Tavistock.
On top of that, people like Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Horkeimer, and others, actually came to United States to teach this stuff in American universities.
That makes sense. I think the UK has a few representatives in this camp, like Terry Eagleton, but your point about the English translations rings true.
As I've said before, there's a profitable market for anti-market texts in the USA.
Terry Eagleton's critique of postmodernism gave me another perspective on what I was being taught about that topic as a psychology undergraduate in the early 1990s. So I'm grateful to him for that.
Libdemmery has vastly infiltrated the Conservative Party too, the Anna Soubrys and Dominic Grieves etc. No wonder we never got any conservatism over the past 14 years. Likewise with Labour, where it's called Blairism. The hard-core Lib Dems though are the worst of the lot. Watching Davey plunging down water slides to avoid talking about postmasters showed how easily played these so-called intellectuals are.
I'm a passive Lib Dem member. The membership are still our last hope to legalise khat again, other recreationals, smoking with consent, and permit the sharing of premises for the sale of sex. So I'm still a paid up member.
But I was gobsmacked to receive this in an email from the local party saluting the LD candidates that had lost "They have all done us proud and deserved a more just result." The very notion that there is a thing called results justice. Haiyaa.
Razor sharp. This is every single one of my dad's friends in leafy, neat and tidy, NIMBY, electric vehicle-owning semi-rural Derbyshire. Bed-blocking larger families from moving up the property ladder into their increasingly difficult to maintain empty nest four and five-beds, these retirees wring their hands over whether solar panels from China or dates from Israel are a morally defensible purchase, before driving to Waitrose in their EV to pick up their sauvignon in time for Gardener's World.
I hate to break it to you, but the intellectual tradition of the modern social justice theory movement was spawned in Europe.
We enthusiastically consumed it and spread it like peanut butter all over everyone and everything.
But let's be clear. It's all from France, Germany, Italy, etc. This stuff all comes from Europe and you should know it. Foucault, Derrida, deMan, Marcuse, Adorno, Fanon, Gramsci, etc. And their intellectual progenitors, Marx and Hegel.
I thought Foucault was bad enough- the father-hating Luciferian intellect which spawned the belief that mental illness was simply an intolerance of eccentricity, leading to the destruction of mental illness institutions- when we now know that most mental illnesses (distinct from mental health issues) are the result of physiological brain dysfunction. That being said, the concept of the panopticon is highly salient to the modern age- although in terms of luxury belief signalling and hall monitoring social enforcement it would be more accurate to argue many eyes rather than one.
Then I encountered Marcuse, and the more I learn about him the more I despise the man. He literally invented the to-the-right of Stalin playbook, designed to lump together the centre with the 'far' right as a means of destabilising the previously reasonable middle ground- although as a side effect it also created mass cowardice. He was also wrong about sexual repression in healthy adults- it's the new puritans and socialist countries which seem to produce hordes of unremitting virgins.
Finally there is Franz Fanon. He literally invented modern Islamic Terrorism- which more people seemed to know back in the noughties. Google might tell you that Sartre only advocated violence against colonialism, but this is simply not the case. He supported violence as a unifying force for groups seeking to combat the alienation of capitalist societies, which is presumably why he wrote the preface to The Wretched of the Earth. So anyway, British Librarians and other institutional apparatchik are using the work of the inventor of Islamic Terrorism to justify the destruction of British culture, and rebranding all of Western history as uniquely evil.
Imagine being naive enough to believe one could mobilise militant Islam in order to usher in the glorious revolution, and then easily dismiss and discard it after the event. The inevitability of Iran is a lesson the Left never seems to learn.
The Jordan Peterson episode with Dr Paul Kengor is well-worth a watch. Marx's favourite quote from Mephistopheles was that "Everything that exists deserves to perish." Family and intimates referred to Marx as Mephistopheles. Little wonder he gulled the so many in the world into a Faustian deal which never delivers.
Perhaps Foucault objected to the panopticon, a progressive invention, because he resented the idea of mutual behavioural policing in general. As the son of a wealthy family, he expected the privilege of behaving exactly how he wished to at all times.
True, but I also think he believed Western capitalist societies were uniquely oppressive. Sure, they’re oppressive- all societies are- but they also happen to be the least oppressive societies in history (at least when one considers the alternative, state of nature oppression).
I forgot Rousseau, the enlightenment cuckoo, responsible for more damage done to education than any other source. He actually believed that the enlightenment was a movement from contract to status, rather than status to contract. Talk about 360 ideological blinders!
There is great Stanley Baldwin source on Sir Henry Maine. Here it is:
https://literaryreview.co.uk/destination-unknown
It’s just the first paragraph that I was interested in. What is it about Victorian Jurists? Lord Moulton was another one. His speech to the Authors Club on the Domain of Obedience to the Unenforceable warns us about exactly where we are today. He was emphatic that manners (political correctness) should never be legislated.
I should include monsieur Fanon in the short list.
I would add Thomas Szasz and R.D. Laing to Foucault when casting blame for the collapse of mental health institutions. But also many of the mainstream psychiatrists themselves, whose treatments of the mentally ill, such as lobotomy and electro-convulsive 'therapy', did nothing for the reputation of the profession.
Hmm. That's a bit like saying we got the banjo from Africa, conveniently forgetting the minstrel shows, hillbilly and Pete Seeger. The intellectual tradition tradition may have been spawned in Europe, but it largely came to us through American universities and their, erm, spawn.
My Dad, good Tory councillor that he was, loved Pete Seeger.
Perhaps. But you're talking about the instrument and I'm talking about the music. That's where the banjo metaphor falls apart. The typewriter is more apt.
The problem is that nearly every piece of critical theory work in American humanities for the last 40 years quotes these guys directly. Over and over and over. I lived it. The humanities became corrupted by it throughout.
I think the route was via the USA because of the English translations made there in the 1990s and 2000s, when people were discovering this retro esoteric stuff online, having dropped classical Marxism in 1989 with the uprisings against it in both Europe and China. For example Simulacra and Simulation was originally published in 1981, but the English translation not until 1994.
Perhaps it was not just a question of very few British people studying original works in French, German, or Italian, but also that these works didn't find much of a British audience in the 1960s or 1970s because the time wasn't right for them. An exception being Foucault's 1961 book on madness which was published in English in 1965 by the Tavistock.
On top of that, people like Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Horkeimer, and others, actually came to United States to teach this stuff in American universities.
That makes sense. I think the UK has a few representatives in this camp, like Terry Eagleton, but your point about the English translations rings true.
As I've said before, there's a profitable market for anti-market texts in the USA.
Terry Eagleton's critique of postmodernism gave me another perspective on what I was being taught about that topic as a psychology undergraduate in the early 1990s. So I'm grateful to him for that.
And frankly, this is largely why the current administration is hammering Harvard. They are the top domino.
Libdemmery has vastly infiltrated the Conservative Party too, the Anna Soubrys and Dominic Grieves etc. No wonder we never got any conservatism over the past 14 years. Likewise with Labour, where it's called Blairism. The hard-core Lib Dems though are the worst of the lot. Watching Davey plunging down water slides to avoid talking about postmasters showed how easily played these so-called intellectuals are.
And when I visit their citadels such as Wells and Padstow, my first comment is usually "there's not much sign of diversity here, is there".
I humbly submit this post, on a similar theme: https://open.substack.com/pub/newsfromuncibal/p/prince-of-the-cuddlecrats
An absolutely delightful takedown. Thank you!