It's been said that you can achieve a great deal if you're unbothered about taking credit for it. Perhaps it's also true that you can inflict severe losses on your opponents provided you don't force them to publicly admit it.
Anybody with an unconstrained, Whiggish view of politics that sees their objectives as inevitable is especially unlikely to admit fault. By comparison, the constrained view of politics is all about deciding which losses you'd prefer to take.
The problem with object-level losses inflicted that way is that it leaves the structures of prestige and influence, and the networks behind them, intact. These are the weapons of the fox. If they are not disarmed of them, a new utopian – or frankly, plainly sadistic – insanity to rub people’s faces in is dreamed up quickly.
The current trend to me seems to be to retrench on some object level issues while building systems that make future such retrenchments obsolete (cf. events in Romania, now successfully completed, and Breton’s comments that they might do the same in Germany).
The pee tape aspect of it is memory holed because it was just bad info.
The problem is that a lot of people made asses of themselves in early 2022 saying Russia wasn't going to invade Ukraine and used that as a cudgel, and then pivoted after that towards a smarmy tankie-curious attitude. So lessons don't get learned on being able to disaggregate the untruth of Russiagate with broader geopolitical questions because of Everything-Bagel politics, whether it be of the woke variety or the "just asking questions" type
With the Russiagate stuff they would give you that screwed up face as though they don’t know what you’re referring to AND that you are an unhinged reprobate for bringing it up. A tactic of apiece with ‘it’s not happening, okay it is and there should be more of it’ (see: youth trans healthcare).
Just the other day my thoughts flitted back to #wecanbezero and the realisation that if the Irish Social Democrats with rising star Holly Cairns who has the cultural cache of a Countess Markievicz, the loony left and their shock troops and the 14 or so Una Mullally’s of our legacy media had their way, we would still be in Covid Lockdown. (Special mention: the conversion practices bill, which we might scoff at now but for which DCUSU succeeded in banning sale of the Irish Times on campus because it published a letter criticising the dangerous idea that maybe a child in your therapy practice who claims to be born in the wrong body should perhaps rethink a path of puberty blockers and opposite sex hormones).
Yes, I was teaching there at the time. Imagine that the most countercultural thing you could do was to carry an Irish Times under your arm. On another occasion, there was a sizeable planned protest whose aim was to pressure the college to fire a lecturer who had the temerity to criticise BLM in a blog post.
What an outstanding essay, Conor.
It's been said that you can achieve a great deal if you're unbothered about taking credit for it. Perhaps it's also true that you can inflict severe losses on your opponents provided you don't force them to publicly admit it.
Anybody with an unconstrained, Whiggish view of politics that sees their objectives as inevitable is especially unlikely to admit fault. By comparison, the constrained view of politics is all about deciding which losses you'd prefer to take.
The problem with object-level losses inflicted that way is that it leaves the structures of prestige and influence, and the networks behind them, intact. These are the weapons of the fox. If they are not disarmed of them, a new utopian – or frankly, plainly sadistic – insanity to rub people’s faces in is dreamed up quickly.
The current trend to me seems to be to retrench on some object level issues while building systems that make future such retrenchments obsolete (cf. events in Romania, now successfully completed, and Breton’s comments that they might do the same in Germany).
Great post - absolution through liberal memory holes!
For example, it's almost 10 years since the Russiagate hoax, and there is still no real acceptance by progressives of that con.
A quarter of a century later, the neoliberal WMD hoax (Bush & Blair) is accepted, but goes largely unmentioned by mainstream (liberal) media voices.
Over 30 years after the debacle of Western intervention in Balkans and most wouldn't even know what you're talking about...
The righteous are always right!
If they are not, then forget it!
Don't dwell on the past, look to the future!
The Russia stuff is another great example, yep
The pee tape aspect of it is memory holed because it was just bad info.
The problem is that a lot of people made asses of themselves in early 2022 saying Russia wasn't going to invade Ukraine and used that as a cudgel, and then pivoted after that towards a smarmy tankie-curious attitude. So lessons don't get learned on being able to disaggregate the untruth of Russiagate with broader geopolitical questions because of Everything-Bagel politics, whether it be of the woke variety or the "just asking questions" type
With the Russiagate stuff they would give you that screwed up face as though they don’t know what you’re referring to AND that you are an unhinged reprobate for bringing it up. A tactic of apiece with ‘it’s not happening, okay it is and there should be more of it’ (see: youth trans healthcare).
Just the other day my thoughts flitted back to #wecanbezero and the realisation that if the Irish Social Democrats with rising star Holly Cairns who has the cultural cache of a Countess Markievicz, the loony left and their shock troops and the 14 or so Una Mullally’s of our legacy media had their way, we would still be in Covid Lockdown. (Special mention: the conversion practices bill, which we might scoff at now but for which DCUSU succeeded in banning sale of the Irish Times on campus because it published a letter criticising the dangerous idea that maybe a child in your therapy practice who claims to be born in the wrong body should perhaps rethink a path of puberty blockers and opposite sex hormones).
DCU Student Union got the sale of Irish Times banned on campus!? 😂
Yes, I was teaching there at the time. Imagine that the most countercultural thing you could do was to carry an Irish Times under your arm. On another occasion, there was a sizeable planned protest whose aim was to pressure the college to fire a lecturer who had the temerity to criticise BLM in a blog post.
I am with you in my gut. My head says simmer down. Not sure which is right.