This is an unofficial Bulletin Board - owned and run by its users. We welcome all fans of the Mighty Collingwood Football Club.
Ad blocker detected: Our website is made possible by displaying online advertisements to our visitors. Please consider supporting us by disabling your ad blocker on our website.
Progressive politics is facing extinction, former British prime minister Tony Blair has warned in a stinging critique of the far-left and its “voter-repellent” approach to culture, gender, race and identity.
Blair, one of just three Labour leaders to ever win general elections in the United Kingdom, also said his crisis-plagued party needed “total deconstruction and reconstruction”
Fair call on all counts there I'd say.
Blair cautioned against reading too much into US President Joe Biden’s election victory, which he said was more a political aberration than a sign the left understood the policy formula required to win big contests.
Yep.
Outlining the principles of how to arrest the left’s electoral woes, Blair warned against “keeping your head down”.
“There is a big culture battle going on. Progressive folk tend to wince at terms such as ‘woke’ and ‘political correctness’, but the normal public knows exactly what they mean,” he said.
“And the battle is being fought on ground defined by the right because sensible progressives don’t want to be on the field at all. The consequence of this is that the radical progressives, who are quite happy to fight on that ground, carry the progressive standard.
“The fact that it ensures continued right-wing victory doesn’t deter them at all. On the contrary, it gives them a heightened sense of righteousness, like political kamikaze.”
Guy is talking far too much sense.
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down.
Grandiose narcissist Blair helped kill them off with Iraq, but as you know I'm no friend of the far left, either. You can't be under the delusion that you have anything to contribute except niche insight if you don't understand and embrace business and commerce.
But, my views would only make the left less popular for now (see Lib Dem parties), but at least they'd be less popular for trying to manage the whole of the socioeconomy, not just the parts they bothered to understand at university or were told were important by grandad.
The right 'wins' because it's a vile purveyor of the lowest human instincts imaginable. Claiming any victory in the piss easy task of inciting violence against weaker targets, running errands for robber barons, and inducing stress in people by flooding their minds with hatred, contempt, conspiracy and paranoia, stimulating recklessness and blind rage to make it easier to rob them blind, is the moral equivalent of claiming slavery as a victory.
Neither, thanks very much. Let's use our brains to understand more of the whole, including both our commercial and competitive instincts, and our smarter human selves which recognise in the light of day that the only serious wins worth a pinch of anything are long-term mutual wins.
Progressive politics is facing extinction, former British prime minister Tony Blair has warned in a stinging critique of the far-left and its “voter-repellent” approach to culture, gender, race and identity.
1: Tony Blair is and always was a centre-right politician, never a left-winger in the first place.
2: Culture, gender, race and identity are not and never have been left-right issues.
3: The "voter-repellent obsession" with non-core issues he identifies does indeed exist, and it has come about largely by way of reaction to the effective castration of former left-leaning parties by business-captured right-wing econocrats such as Tony Blair. (In Australia, Hawke was rather similar. In the short-term Hawke did well, but long-term his government crippled Australia with idiotic policies like the privatisation of education and the sell-out to business interests.)
It's a sad sad view of the society we've created if it's the left that's viewed as the one out of touch with reality when the likes of Trump rode to victory on the back of the far right and their bat shit lot of conspiracy theorists, religious zealots and white supremacists.
So far responses as predictable as night following Day.
The left, or at least the far left, is absolutely out of touch with reality. Equally as much as the far right but in different ways.
Trump didn't get elected because of far right nutjobs, he channeled a protest vote against the establishment buy the ordinary person who felt, deservedly so, let down by both parties and a self serving establishment. The blue collar working class that Clinton labelled deplorables.
The right wing nutjobs were the ones clinging on when the others were walking back.
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down.
^Those susceptible to that sort of messaging won't like to hear it, no. The gun issue is probably the simplest example to use to show that you're dealing with a weirdo culture removed from Western civilisational norms. Anti-vaxxer lunacy is another clear exhibit, as obviously is the religious devotion to completely dangerous whack job Trump. It's like a giant, overgrown sect removed from time. Elements of this naturally happen everywhere, but not at that sort of normalised scale.
Sometimes reality is uncomfortable, but it's still reality. Backward, behind, unfit for the contemporary era, unable to compete in the 21st century. There's no mincing words about it because all that does is drag the problem out. These folks have been held back to be controlled and robbed silly by the church, the deranged GOP, robber barons and shonky used car salesmen like Trump. That's where their anger needs to be directed because they've been sold a lie as the world has moved on without them and now they lack the tools and wherewithal to cope and compete. Until that reality is grasped, ongoing decline in their wellbeing is inevitable.
But, as I say, the only novel aspect of Trump was the collapsing and abandonment of serious political discourse around him, which was a result of the peculiarly deviant malignant narcissist psychopathology/reality TV/social media combination he brought to the table.
Ignoring Blair's catastrophic and deadly failures and corrupt relationship with fossil fuels (not easy when those very words I just said about him are entirely factual), he got some of the economics right, as did Brown after him. It was just framed incorrectly because he was a grandiose narcissist with leftist cringe seeking the very same corporate and elite glory given others but surely also owed to him as a superior human specimen, hence justifying the wreckage that ultimately followed. (He is clearly a textbook grandiose narcissist, like Trump, but a more clever and refined institutional version).
So, it's very difficult to get past flaws that heinous and vile, that killed so many people and set off such a chain of human catastrophe in the process, to isolate what he got right. Not to mention the impact of the GFC on the UK due to the bias towards the financial system created by him (partly good in terms of national specialisation, but as was shown with the GFC and later Brexit very high risk and entirely London-centric).
Given his two lost wars and corrupt self-dealing as a fossil fuels consultant are well beyond rehabilitation, and in respect for the millions dead through his narcissistic decisions alone, Hawke-Keating or perhaps Gordon Brown alone (someone I know less about), are a much better examples to consider.
