Smug liberal freak David Aaronvitch advances a stunning new argument: people who don't dig the gay agenda are secretly gay themselves.
Hey, fat boy, 1975 called: they'd like their talking points back. Well, either that, or Dave's standard issue leftism means he secretly fantasises about indulging in orgies of tax-cutting.
All of this is his way of claiming that the right are really huge hypocrites - unlike leftists who have no morals at all and don't care who knows it. Also - and I know this may shock you - Dave's noticed that some folks in the Third World aren't down with sorting sex out man to man....
Don't worry though. The obnoxious open borders booster manages to swerve round the obvious implication of his position. See, Western supporters of traditional values are totally the same as the people who want to string up interior designers.
Still, that's not the biggest outbreak of humbug in his article. Try this:
Compared to the reigning ideology on the average university campus, social conservatives are the John Stuart Mills de nos jours. Which is lucky because libertarians are increasingly giving up the fight, throwing their own ideology under the bus as soon as the chance to score some hip points comes along. Quote of the day? Really?
There's the obvious point that Fatty Dave's deliberate collapsing of the distinction between those who support traditional values, and those who want to impose them, is a common trick of the totalitarian-minded, but it goes a little deeper than that. One of the central points of libertarianism is the distinction between those who use violence and those who don't - to suddenly decide that it's no big deal after all is to expose just what a fraud most modern libertarianism is.
Hey, fat boy, 1975 called: they'd like their talking points back. Well, either that, or Dave's standard issue leftism means he secretly fantasises about indulging in orgies of tax-cutting.
All of this is his way of claiming that the right are really huge hypocrites - unlike leftists who have no morals at all and don't care who knows it. Also - and I know this may shock you - Dave's noticed that some folks in the Third World aren't down with sorting sex out man to man....
Don't worry though. The obnoxious open borders booster manages to swerve round the obvious implication of his position. See, Western supporters of traditional values are totally the same as the people who want to string up interior designers.
Still, that's not the biggest outbreak of humbug in his article. Try this:
The sexual conservative’s true hypocrisy is that he doesn’t really believe in his own idealisation. Men will be inflamed by the sight of hair, women will bear other men’s children at the fall of a veil, boys will suddenly cast off the tedious ways of heterosexuality and put on the gaudy garb of gayness.Say what? There's only one side of the great divide that obsessed with the idea that men can be inflamed at the drop of a hat. Hell, the article itself makes no sense unless you assume that, without the iron grip of PC, our nation's socio-cons will be out there whipping the public up into a queer-bashing frenzy.
Compared to the reigning ideology on the average university campus, social conservatives are the John Stuart Mills de nos jours. Which is lucky because libertarians are increasingly giving up the fight, throwing their own ideology under the bus as soon as the chance to score some hip points comes along. Quote of the day? Really?
There's the obvious point that Fatty Dave's deliberate collapsing of the distinction between those who support traditional values, and those who want to impose them, is a common trick of the totalitarian-minded, but it goes a little deeper than that. One of the central points of libertarianism is the distinction between those who use violence and those who don't - to suddenly decide that it's no big deal after all is to expose just what a fraud most modern libertarianism is.
5 comments:
"The conservative evangelical movement in America is famous for many things, and its many sexual scandals are one of its most celebrated products."
Because all that patient work of keeping communities together - black and white alike; their endless charitable money raising for public works such as hospital building and financing health care for the poor [which is of course physically impossible in a small island in the north Atlantic due to MMGW]; the drug and alcohol rehabilitations they do; the ceaseless striving to make some kind of order and decency in America's violent inner-cities - all that at parish-level and nationally is as nothing as when some televangelist drops his pants...
Liberals, huh? They always strive to see only the best in (the right sort of) people.
Yes indeed, you can take Dave out of the Party but you can't take the Party out of Dave... It's the classic Stalinist "amalgam" - Hitler is against our Beloved Leader, Trotsky is against our Beloved Leader, therefore Trotskyists are fascists.
See also the authentic note of condescending disdain towards actual proles:
"what makes David Cameron think that ten quid a week will bind Wayne and Stacey in a marriage neither can stand?"
Well, actually, Wayne and Stacey's grandparents probably made a go of their marriages, and that probably had something to do with having some incentive not to bail out at the first sign that it wasn't going to be roses, roses all the way. But for Dave it's just an instance of the oppression we all groaned under before the Great Cultural Revolution.
Great post, Jon.
Not really sure what your point is. Libertarians may or may not be into vanilla Christian sexual morality (it is not a libertarian issue either way... indeed having sexual morality not be a political *is* the libertarian position).
But that does not mean some people who happen to be libertarians cannot get their jollies pointing out that some conservatives get very weird around the subject of sexual morality.
Where Aaronvitch is in thin ice is implying sexual weirdness and conservatism are synonymous. That is clearly an unfair generalisation and in any case, 'conservatives' come in many flavours, just as libertarians do. However it is also true that where libertarians (and most classical liberal conservatives) often depart from a certain ilk of paleo-conservative or overtly hyphenated Christian-Conservatives is over issues of the state actively imposing certain forms of sexual morality rather than letting civil society sort itself out.
"One of the central points of libertarianism is the distinction between those who use violence and those who don't"
Actually, that was never one of the central planks of neo-libertarianism. The distinction is between those who are caught using violence and those that aren't - but they have no better mechanism for finding out who has used violence (or, indeed committed any crime) than this current bunch of politicians. The response of Labour, Tory and Lib Dem is to use ever increasing methods of surveillance - CCTV, databases, etc. - to try and catch the violent or criminal. The response of neo-libertarians is to not bother. I'll let you work out what that will mean for society.
No Stan, the usual libertarian position is to have a great deal less laws but actually enforce the ones that stand behind a person's negative rights, which means things like allowing effective self-defence and other meaningful defences of private property. These are also notions most conservatives of the non-big-state variety also have no problem supporting.
As it is the regulatory state has hollowed out civil society and all the pressures against anti-social behaviour that a functioning civil society brings, most libbos just have difficulty swallowing the idea that the solution to the state fucking things up is more state action, just as long as it is by people who call themselves Tories.
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