It's only politics obsessives like us who listen to Aly and Stephens' The Minefield.. or did.
I got weary of their tedious belaboured pompous know-it-all pontificating a while ago.
What's more concerning is that their both-sides-ism has become the norm for news and analysis more widely, even on the ABC.
And what is striking about the unseemly haste with which Trumpism is being sanctioned by allegedly objective commentators (under the rubric "he won so he must be right") is their lack of scepticism about the sincerity of his stated goals.
It's bleedingly obvious that Trump and his co-conspirators couldn't give a rats' arse about the future of humankind.
I'm listening to News radio as I WFH and their interview with the head of Red Bridge, a former LNP adviser, was straight out LMP boosterism. It's a fairly predictable pattern on that station. One wonders what Kim Williams is doing, he's employed a lot a commercial media people lately while bloviating about...I'm not quite sure what.
Aly seems to be the type that is addicted to attention, even at the expense of credibility.
Stan Grant is similar. The Saturday Paper has published some truly idiotic stuff from him; e.g. his supposed affinity with (the obvious charlatan) J.D. Vance based on a shared experience of humble upbringings.
To me, Grant is one of those annoying Christian writers who refuses to countenance the universe fundtioning with no god. Their reasoning is circular, a sort of 'ipso facto god must exist' argument.
That was a challenging article (I had to put it down early on and start it again after doing something else), but I think you might have misinterpreted what Stan was saying. Sometimes we really need to sit with the things Stan says, especially if we have no highly relevant life experience to draw on. Referring to Vance as he did was incredibly confronting but I think that was partly the purpose - to try to get us to confront ourselves and our relative privilege.
I suspect that Stan would expect that many of us would struggle to connect with what he was trying to get us to think about, but he hoped that some of us would give ourselves time to engage honestly and critically with the piece. My great grandfather was a slum abolitionist and Stan's article made me wonder if I could ever truly 'connect' with his life despite my immense admiration for such work.
The article was written the middle of an election (for the most consequential position in world affairs) where there was one flawed-but-sensible candidate and one demagogue.
Grant tried to pretend that somehow a craven opportunist supporting the demagogue was ackshully just a wholesome fellow whose every word could be taken at face value. For good measure, he also managed to imply that the sensible candidate was really just as bad as the demagogue in a couple of throwaway lines.
If Grant wanted to make a point about faith or values, then he could have easily chosen an example who was not a complete charlatan.
But he didn't, because he was trying to be provocative and the article was mostly about himself. The end result was an article that only made sense if you had no idea who Trump and Vance were, and was hopelessly self-indulgent. It was silly and gutless.
I didn't read it that way at all. I started by trying to think about living on the margins of society, living in a shack with a dirt floor as a child, confronting immense and continual prejudices, etc and what that makes you experience in your life. Stan worked from those life experiences and then found commonalities in his life experiences with people who live/d in Vance's community struggling on the margins.
He wasn't offering excuses for behaviour or pretending anything. Stan probably also understands more than a great many of us why and how some who Vance pretends to represent are now recognizing that he has been using them to grift and for his political ends, and how this recognition may very well spread over time, leaving Vance vulnerable to complete reliance on the oligarchs who probably actually have very little respect for him.
G'day Greg, Stan Grants affinity with JD Vance's could also have a lot to do with his geopolitical position vis a vis Russia/OTAN and similar situations and the empires present and past role therein.
I have never understood Aly’s appeal. He has always been a raging conservative. I don’t like making ad hominem attacks, but he’s always been insufferably smug. It would be easy to think you’re the reincarnation of Socrates if you surround yourself with b-grade clowns. He always repeats IPA research as if it’s fact. I don’t watch FTA, but there are some amusing takedowns of him. I almost fell of my chair when some shallow presenter on the ABC said to him that he had an intellect the size of the MCG. He smiled knowingly, as if it were self-evident. More like ego the size of the MCG. Monash University only has him on the payroll for marketing reasons: using celebrity power is a way to attract naive young students to your institution. I think anybody who uses “woke” has lost the argument. Has it become to the right what Nazis were to the left? The only people talking about woke are conservatives or maybe centre liberal columnists. There was much that was wrong with Harris’s campaign, but her loss had nothing to do with woke. She sought to downplay her colour (probably knowing it was unpopular to make an issue of it) and it was certainly the Trump campaign that was fixated on woke. I saw on the news that conservatives are blaming the Los Angeles bushfires on woke. Supposedly the senior management at the Los Angeles Fire Department were more focussed on ticking DEI boxes than hiring burly white men, which resulted in a shortage of burly white men able to put out fires. This is a more convincing explanation in Fox News land than anthropomorphic climate change. There you go! All this time I was worrying about climate change when it was woke that was the threat! Woke is another distraction used to distract people from the real issues. I am not opposed to woke but what passes as woke to me just seems like good manners: respect people, accept people are different, live and let live. I guess others see it as a threat to their privileged position as white males. I know corporate DEI initiatives have somewhat tainted the equality movement. Corporations using the concept to appear progressive because it doesn’t involve any actual redistribution of wealth and power. But corporations also co-opted mindlessness and I don’t think their use of it to silence concerns about poor working conditions should undermine what is an interesting and potentially useful modality. Are we supposed to go back to a world in which LGBTIQ people repress their identity? People from different ethnicities should only celebrate their cultures within their homes? And, worst of all, kids suffering from conditions like gender dysphoria suffer and even take their own lives? Won’t you think of the children says the man who was a frequent user of Epstein’s plane.
I was on a panel with him talking about their Q4 Essay at Adelaide Writers Festival and he was quite defensive I thought, for someone advocating open discussion. This style of piece has become a genre, as that piece in The Atlantic yesterday testified.
I think the declension of your subtitle is exactly right.
Resentment causes brainrot. In liberal societies, it tends to be the much less afflicted who are sufficiently resentful to get this brainrot.
I’m not saying that happened here—there are probably many things going on. The femeninization of certain political stances, the desire to stand out from others among writers. Are you just going to be ANOTHER ONE who says ‘oh, no!’ to various depredations and threats (especially if you don’t fear them much)? The success people have when they position themselves exactly at this sweet spot this essay seems to be in. And more!
So very predictable. Beyond tedious. They simply repeat ideas that have already been expressed over and over. At the moment, they have an audience who will be surprised by their shift. The shift then results in an audience who needs to hear the same things over and over since, on some level, they want to drown out the outcry from the people who are threatened by these political shifts. It’s almost a ritual at this point.
The part forgotten in all this is the rust belt in America's midwest(sic). The lives that are now precarious and hardly viable any more with health insurance being unaffordable and a corporate scheme with medicine being one of the most expensive in the world alongside the high unemployment and low wages and slow destruction of infrastructure cause these individuals to lose confidence in the system and look to demagogues even when they are oligarchical and represent the systems interests not their own. All of this is not new and has been written and studied about as part of the way empires subside/fail.
Strange bedfellows will join in and one needs to looks for cui bono from it and how. Propaganda is the legacy medias job as the owners do not want change or a return to social democracy or similar or proper taxing of the renter class.
Now that Trump has ditched the establishment Republican minders who reined in his worst excesses during his first term, we can expect a chaotic and damaging second term.
It's easy to say from the relative safety of Australia, but I believe it may be best if Trump creates such an appalling mess that Trumpism is forever discredited. Sure, many people will be hurt but there may be no other way, especially given that the left is now a demoralised rump with less public appeal than last weeks left over porridge.
As to legacy media opinionators like Waleed Aly, I don't think they matter. New media figures who've swung right like Joe Rogan matter. Ditto the moguls Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. And I pray that in the fullness of time, the left will be re-energised and rejuvenate its own currently depleted pool of powerful influencers and moguls.
I think it’s wildly optimistic. The essence of Trumpism is that there’s always somebody else to blame. In the previous term, the agenda was thwarted by the deep-state. I have long ago given-up thinking that hardcore Trump supporters will be swayed by evidence. I think it this election many soft-Trump supporters were swayed by misinformation. Some of them were absorbed into the Fox News disinformation network and others just saw Trump as this blank canvas on which to project their hopes and dreams. He was going to lower prices, he was going to take on the private health insurance companies. I think for many he became this peasant-like folk hero, a sort of Robin Hood/Baba Yaga figure, who’d punish the bad and help the good. It’s just a sign that many of us have either regressed to peasant brain or never got beyond it. But, yeah, the right-wing misinformation network continues to grow. Maybe things will be so bad that people become disillusioned or maybe they’re so absorbed by the right wing misinformation sphere that they’ll never escape?
Lot's of truth in what you say. With Trump in power, many MAGA cultists will be feeling elated and no longer vexed about issues like the cost of living even if by objective measures those things get worse and they are significantly poorer.
Anything short of Johnny Maga losing his job and his house may be insufficient to turn him off Trumpism. We live in a weird age.
It’s really hard to imagine what would’ve made many people vote for Biden given the media environment. It’s taken me by surprise the power of the media to shape people’s perception of reality. Now that Trump has been elected, the economy is the greatest ever. I guess there wasn’t much of a counter-narrative. How can you shift people’s perceptions when you rarely speak in public. The president’s job is primarily sales-person-in-chief. How can you do that if you can’t speak without the assistance of a teleprompter.
I think 'media environment' is a very pertinent phrase as we head into the election season here in Australia. A familiar trope is beginning to emerge: the media are bored with Labor. According to them, Albo is bereft of ideas and boring as batshit and maybe Dutto is onto something with his anti-woke (apparently his education policy consists of wanting to return primary schools to places if education not indoctrination, bloody woke teachers) nuclear powered electoral juggernaut.
That someone with his track record and lack of intellectual depth could even make it to where he is today without being seriously challenged on policy or intellectual grounds speaks volumes about the lack of depth and laziness of the Australian media.
Running Biden as a candidate was an insult to the electorate. Harris took the reins too late and lacked credibility because Americans expect a primary. She also said dumb things that the Republicans used to great effect in attack ads
I agree that everyone says stupid things (no one more so than Trump, of course).
Unfortunately conservatives are masters at grabbing a handful of unwise statements made by liberals and using them in attack ads that make the liberal seem like an out of touch crazy woke ivory tower elite who wants to enforce Gender Ideology in schools or something of a similar nature. I think those ads really do work in energising the conservative base and turning moderates off voting for liberals.
With America being such a conservative nation, liberals have to be more cautious with their comments than conservatives. It isn't fair but that's how it is, IMO
From the temporarily safe Australia I just hope that enough blatantly obvious damage occurs before our election campaign since the LNP and their billionaire backer Gina are clearly in cahoots.
The events on January 6 were an ugly reminder of the effects of toxic masculinity and white rightwing activism, that permeates from a minority across all parts of the USA. Certainly it should be condemned, not explained away and rationalised as to be an expected outcome from electoral disappointment. However to categorise Biden as a man of moderation and cooperation is a bit rich. Biden was never a man concerned about social justice or disastrous wars, but more concerned about appeasing his wealthy backers in Wall Street like Obama.
This is just Trump's refinement of Newt Gingrich's attack on Democrats. There's no longer a need for evidence or even arguments, all you need is people in positions of authority making assertions. Publish the message in the media and it exists, and if it exists is may be true. Go ahead and refute it, both sides have their position.
Perhaps they're super intellectuals?! But they just don't understand that racism is wrong, as is the gross inequality between the poorest and wealthiest in the world, or the disaster of continuing to exploit and use fossil fuels.
It would be far more interesting if they could hypothesize ways in which these matters could be addressed or even turned around. There must be examples out there and you could reflect on why certain approaches or projects did or didn't work. Propose another way and let people discuss it.
Left vs right seems so outmoded, especially when there's no other place to put Labor except on the left.
I haven't read the article referred to so won't comment on it, but have listened to Scott and Waleed for years. They definitely know that racism is wrong and I can't think of any reason to imagine they don't understand climate change. They have been advocating for a greater consideration of wealth inequality/class for a while, arguing that we are missing important things in our analyses because the concept of class has become somewhat unfashionable as a point of analysis.
I’m not a fan of Aly at all but I did read his piece on the trump election victory and I don’t agree with your take at all that it’s a celebration over the forces of woke. Nowhere in the article is there any indication of how Aly himself might have voted if he were American, and there’s very little on his personal views of trump.
In fact the article is Aly’s analysis of where the hysterical reactions to the election result may have got it wrong, and I think there may well be a lot of truth in his argument. I have seen many other similar opinions from commentators who are Democrats through and through, but are prepared to concede that the party totally misread the room at this election.
Just as I think you have misread Aly’s views on the election result.
Aly gives Panadols headaches - daily . I struggle to see how he is even relevant in any way. His columns, if you can actually finish one are non recyclable rubbish .
From the Wikipedia entry on freedom of speech: "Freedom of speech is usually seen as a negative right. This means that the government is legally obliged to take no action against the speaker based on the speaker's views, but that no one is obliged to help any speakers publish their views, and no one is required to listen to, agree with, or acknowledge the speaker or the speaker's views. These concepts correspond to earlier traditions of natural law and common law rights."
Nothing in free speech demands that John host anyone's views.
It's only politics obsessives like us who listen to Aly and Stephens' The Minefield.. or did.
I got weary of their tedious belaboured pompous know-it-all pontificating a while ago.
What's more concerning is that their both-sides-ism has become the norm for news and analysis more widely, even on the ABC.
And what is striking about the unseemly haste with which Trumpism is being sanctioned by allegedly objective commentators (under the rubric "he won so he must be right") is their lack of scepticism about the sincerity of his stated goals.
It's bleedingly obvious that Trump and his co-conspirators couldn't give a rats' arse about the future of humankind.
I used to enjoy Aly's writing, but it sure has deteriorated in recent years.
I'm listening to News radio as I WFH and their interview with the head of Red Bridge, a former LNP adviser, was straight out LMP boosterism. It's a fairly predictable pattern on that station. One wonders what Kim Williams is doing, he's employed a lot a commercial media people lately while bloviating about...I'm not quite sure what.
Aly seems to be the type that is addicted to attention, even at the expense of credibility.
Stan Grant is similar. The Saturday Paper has published some truly idiotic stuff from him; e.g. his supposed affinity with (the obvious charlatan) J.D. Vance based on a shared experience of humble upbringings.
To me, Grant is one of those annoying Christian writers who refuses to countenance the universe fundtioning with no god. Their reasoning is circular, a sort of 'ipso facto god must exist' argument.
Blinded by their own massive egos. Just like Stephen Fry, an idiot’s idea of what an ‘intellectual’ looks like.
A couple of years ago, it seemed as if the ABC was exclusively devoted to Stephen Fry content. I was expecting to see him giving the weather report.
That was a challenging article (I had to put it down early on and start it again after doing something else), but I think you might have misinterpreted what Stan was saying. Sometimes we really need to sit with the things Stan says, especially if we have no highly relevant life experience to draw on. Referring to Vance as he did was incredibly confronting but I think that was partly the purpose - to try to get us to confront ourselves and our relative privilege.
I suspect that Stan would expect that many of us would struggle to connect with what he was trying to get us to think about, but he hoped that some of us would give ourselves time to engage honestly and critically with the piece. My great grandfather was a slum abolitionist and Stan's article made me wonder if I could ever truly 'connect' with his life despite my immense admiration for such work.
You're being far too generous.
The article was written the middle of an election (for the most consequential position in world affairs) where there was one flawed-but-sensible candidate and one demagogue.
Grant tried to pretend that somehow a craven opportunist supporting the demagogue was ackshully just a wholesome fellow whose every word could be taken at face value. For good measure, he also managed to imply that the sensible candidate was really just as bad as the demagogue in a couple of throwaway lines.
If Grant wanted to make a point about faith or values, then he could have easily chosen an example who was not a complete charlatan.
But he didn't, because he was trying to be provocative and the article was mostly about himself. The end result was an article that only made sense if you had no idea who Trump and Vance were, and was hopelessly self-indulgent. It was silly and gutless.
I didn't read it that way at all. I started by trying to think about living on the margins of society, living in a shack with a dirt floor as a child, confronting immense and continual prejudices, etc and what that makes you experience in your life. Stan worked from those life experiences and then found commonalities in his life experiences with people who live/d in Vance's community struggling on the margins.
He wasn't offering excuses for behaviour or pretending anything. Stan probably also understands more than a great many of us why and how some who Vance pretends to represent are now recognizing that he has been using them to grift and for his political ends, and how this recognition may very well spread over time, leaving Vance vulnerable to complete reliance on the oligarchs who probably actually have very little respect for him.
G'day Greg, Stan Grants affinity with JD Vance's could also have a lot to do with his geopolitical position vis a vis Russia/OTAN and similar situations and the empires present and past role therein.
I have never understood Aly’s appeal. He has always been a raging conservative. I don’t like making ad hominem attacks, but he’s always been insufferably smug. It would be easy to think you’re the reincarnation of Socrates if you surround yourself with b-grade clowns. He always repeats IPA research as if it’s fact. I don’t watch FTA, but there are some amusing takedowns of him. I almost fell of my chair when some shallow presenter on the ABC said to him that he had an intellect the size of the MCG. He smiled knowingly, as if it were self-evident. More like ego the size of the MCG. Monash University only has him on the payroll for marketing reasons: using celebrity power is a way to attract naive young students to your institution. I think anybody who uses “woke” has lost the argument. Has it become to the right what Nazis were to the left? The only people talking about woke are conservatives or maybe centre liberal columnists. There was much that was wrong with Harris’s campaign, but her loss had nothing to do with woke. She sought to downplay her colour (probably knowing it was unpopular to make an issue of it) and it was certainly the Trump campaign that was fixated on woke. I saw on the news that conservatives are blaming the Los Angeles bushfires on woke. Supposedly the senior management at the Los Angeles Fire Department were more focussed on ticking DEI boxes than hiring burly white men, which resulted in a shortage of burly white men able to put out fires. This is a more convincing explanation in Fox News land than anthropomorphic climate change. There you go! All this time I was worrying about climate change when it was woke that was the threat! Woke is another distraction used to distract people from the real issues. I am not opposed to woke but what passes as woke to me just seems like good manners: respect people, accept people are different, live and let live. I guess others see it as a threat to their privileged position as white males. I know corporate DEI initiatives have somewhat tainted the equality movement. Corporations using the concept to appear progressive because it doesn’t involve any actual redistribution of wealth and power. But corporations also co-opted mindlessness and I don’t think their use of it to silence concerns about poor working conditions should undermine what is an interesting and potentially useful modality. Are we supposed to go back to a world in which LGBTIQ people repress their identity? People from different ethnicities should only celebrate their cultures within their homes? And, worst of all, kids suffering from conditions like gender dysphoria suffer and even take their own lives? Won’t you think of the children says the man who was a frequent user of Epstein’s plane.
I was on a panel with him talking about their Q4 Essay at Adelaide Writers Festival and he was quite defensive I thought, for someone advocating open discussion. This style of piece has become a genre, as that piece in The Atlantic yesterday testified.
I think the declension of your subtitle is exactly right.
Resentment causes brainrot. In liberal societies, it tends to be the much less afflicted who are sufficiently resentful to get this brainrot.
I’m not saying that happened here—there are probably many things going on. The femeninization of certain political stances, the desire to stand out from others among writers. Are you just going to be ANOTHER ONE who says ‘oh, no!’ to various depredations and threats (especially if you don’t fear them much)? The success people have when they position themselves exactly at this sweet spot this essay seems to be in. And more!
So very predictable. Beyond tedious. They simply repeat ideas that have already been expressed over and over. At the moment, they have an audience who will be surprised by their shift. The shift then results in an audience who needs to hear the same things over and over since, on some level, they want to drown out the outcry from the people who are threatened by these political shifts. It’s almost a ritual at this point.
The part forgotten in all this is the rust belt in America's midwest(sic). The lives that are now precarious and hardly viable any more with health insurance being unaffordable and a corporate scheme with medicine being one of the most expensive in the world alongside the high unemployment and low wages and slow destruction of infrastructure cause these individuals to lose confidence in the system and look to demagogues even when they are oligarchical and represent the systems interests not their own. All of this is not new and has been written and studied about as part of the way empires subside/fail.
Strange bedfellows will join in and one needs to looks for cui bono from it and how. Propaganda is the legacy medias job as the owners do not want change or a return to social democracy or similar or proper taxing of the renter class.
Now that Trump has ditched the establishment Republican minders who reined in his worst excesses during his first term, we can expect a chaotic and damaging second term.
It's easy to say from the relative safety of Australia, but I believe it may be best if Trump creates such an appalling mess that Trumpism is forever discredited. Sure, many people will be hurt but there may be no other way, especially given that the left is now a demoralised rump with less public appeal than last weeks left over porridge.
As to legacy media opinionators like Waleed Aly, I don't think they matter. New media figures who've swung right like Joe Rogan matter. Ditto the moguls Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. And I pray that in the fullness of time, the left will be re-energised and rejuvenate its own currently depleted pool of powerful influencers and moguls.
I think it’s wildly optimistic. The essence of Trumpism is that there’s always somebody else to blame. In the previous term, the agenda was thwarted by the deep-state. I have long ago given-up thinking that hardcore Trump supporters will be swayed by evidence. I think it this election many soft-Trump supporters were swayed by misinformation. Some of them were absorbed into the Fox News disinformation network and others just saw Trump as this blank canvas on which to project their hopes and dreams. He was going to lower prices, he was going to take on the private health insurance companies. I think for many he became this peasant-like folk hero, a sort of Robin Hood/Baba Yaga figure, who’d punish the bad and help the good. It’s just a sign that many of us have either regressed to peasant brain or never got beyond it. But, yeah, the right-wing misinformation network continues to grow. Maybe things will be so bad that people become disillusioned or maybe they’re so absorbed by the right wing misinformation sphere that they’ll never escape?
Lot's of truth in what you say. With Trump in power, many MAGA cultists will be feeling elated and no longer vexed about issues like the cost of living even if by objective measures those things get worse and they are significantly poorer.
Anything short of Johnny Maga losing his job and his house may be insufficient to turn him off Trumpism. We live in a weird age.
It’s really hard to imagine what would’ve made many people vote for Biden given the media environment. It’s taken me by surprise the power of the media to shape people’s perception of reality. Now that Trump has been elected, the economy is the greatest ever. I guess there wasn’t much of a counter-narrative. How can you shift people’s perceptions when you rarely speak in public. The president’s job is primarily sales-person-in-chief. How can you do that if you can’t speak without the assistance of a teleprompter.
I think 'media environment' is a very pertinent phrase as we head into the election season here in Australia. A familiar trope is beginning to emerge: the media are bored with Labor. According to them, Albo is bereft of ideas and boring as batshit and maybe Dutto is onto something with his anti-woke (apparently his education policy consists of wanting to return primary schools to places if education not indoctrination, bloody woke teachers) nuclear powered electoral juggernaut.
That someone with his track record and lack of intellectual depth could even make it to where he is today without being seriously challenged on policy or intellectual grounds speaks volumes about the lack of depth and laziness of the Australian media.
Running Biden as a candidate was an insult to the electorate. Harris took the reins too late and lacked credibility because Americans expect a primary. She also said dumb things that the Republicans used to great effect in attack ads
I agree on Biden. I had big arguments about this a year ago, when he was being nominated unopposed.
Harris said some stupid things because everyone says some stupid things. Trump got away with outrageous howlers, sanewashed by the media.
I agree that everyone says stupid things (no one more so than Trump, of course).
Unfortunately conservatives are masters at grabbing a handful of unwise statements made by liberals and using them in attack ads that make the liberal seem like an out of touch crazy woke ivory tower elite who wants to enforce Gender Ideology in schools or something of a similar nature. I think those ads really do work in energising the conservative base and turning moderates off voting for liberals.
With America being such a conservative nation, liberals have to be more cautious with their comments than conservatives. It isn't fair but that's how it is, IMO
From the temporarily safe Australia I just hope that enough blatantly obvious damage occurs before our election campaign since the LNP and their billionaire backer Gina are clearly in cahoots.
The events on January 6 were an ugly reminder of the effects of toxic masculinity and white rightwing activism, that permeates from a minority across all parts of the USA. Certainly it should be condemned, not explained away and rationalised as to be an expected outcome from electoral disappointment. However to categorise Biden as a man of moderation and cooperation is a bit rich. Biden was never a man concerned about social justice or disastrous wars, but more concerned about appeasing his wealthy backers in Wall Street like Obama.
This is just Trump's refinement of Newt Gingrich's attack on Democrats. There's no longer a need for evidence or even arguments, all you need is people in positions of authority making assertions. Publish the message in the media and it exists, and if it exists is may be true. Go ahead and refute it, both sides have their position.
Perhaps they're super intellectuals?! But they just don't understand that racism is wrong, as is the gross inequality between the poorest and wealthiest in the world, or the disaster of continuing to exploit and use fossil fuels.
It would be far more interesting if they could hypothesize ways in which these matters could be addressed or even turned around. There must be examples out there and you could reflect on why certain approaches or projects did or didn't work. Propose another way and let people discuss it.
Left vs right seems so outmoded, especially when there's no other place to put Labor except on the left.
I haven't read the article referred to so won't comment on it, but have listened to Scott and Waleed for years. They definitely know that racism is wrong and I can't think of any reason to imagine they don't understand climate change. They have been advocating for a greater consideration of wealth inequality/class for a while, arguing that we are missing important things in our analyses because the concept of class has become somewhat unfashionable as a point of analysis.
I’m not a fan of Aly at all but I did read his piece on the trump election victory and I don’t agree with your take at all that it’s a celebration over the forces of woke. Nowhere in the article is there any indication of how Aly himself might have voted if he were American, and there’s very little on his personal views of trump.
In fact the article is Aly’s analysis of where the hysterical reactions to the election result may have got it wrong, and I think there may well be a lot of truth in his argument. I have seen many other similar opinions from commentators who are Democrats through and through, but are prepared to concede that the party totally misread the room at this election.
Just as I think you have misread Aly’s views on the election result.
Aly gives Panadols headaches - daily . I struggle to see how he is even relevant in any way. His columns, if you can actually finish one are non recyclable rubbish .
Should be rentier class.
Bizarrely off-topic pro-Putin comment removed
Just removed another Putinist. I think it's because of comments I made somewhere else.
Thank you for doing that. This is a good discussion that doesn’t need to be hijacked.
That's polishing your free speech credentials John.
From the Wikipedia entry on freedom of speech: "Freedom of speech is usually seen as a negative right. This means that the government is legally obliged to take no action against the speaker based on the speaker's views, but that no one is obliged to help any speakers publish their views, and no one is required to listen to, agree with, or acknowledge the speaker or the speaker's views. These concepts correspond to earlier traditions of natural law and common law rights."
Nothing in free speech demands that John host anyone's views.