That there Michael Fabricant. He’s a bit of a card. What with his silly wig and self-deprecating humour, he’s the sort of MP tailor-made for social media. Good old Fabbers. At least, so I thought.
I could never appear on a discussion prog with @y_alibhai I would either end up with a brain haemorrhage or by punching her in the throat
— Michael Fabricant (@Mike_Fabricant) June 20, 2014
Oh dear. The mask has slipped. The bants, the joshing, it’s crumbled away leaving something behind suggestive of a deeply unpleasant personality.
I’m not going to spend any more time on Fabricant, especially when Dan Hodges has done a good job. Instead, I’d like to turn my attention to the clots who would defend him.
Who should we find at the head of the pack? Surprising no one, it’s the idiot Delingpole. Now chief pinhead at Breitbart London, James has completed his long hike from rock to crock journalism – as his short piece covering for Fabricant shows. Here, his argument amounts to “it’s wrong to punch Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, but nothing at all wrong with wanting to punch her.” Profound.
As it happens, I will concede that Twitter is home to bands of people who do jump on comments made by politicians and celebs. But no way are hard right fools like Fabricant victims in this regard, it comes with the territory. The powerful and the privileged have long had the power to determine how people with certain shared characteristics are represented officially and in the media, against their will. Twitter and social media are taking pickaxes to the hierarchy. Symbolic violence – look it up, Jimbo – is getting a rougher and rougher ride. You can’t expect to say how you’d like to punch an Asian woman in the throat and get away without being challenged any more.
And they hate it. For Delingpole and co, free speech is being able to speak their limited, lazy minds without any comeback. It’s part and parcel of their so-called libertarianism, a fancy-sounding word that lends their anguish and brittle selfishness philosophical cover. If Fabricant and Delingpole want to make violent statements, here I agree with them, they are completely free to do so. But it’s pathetic even by schoolyard standards to cry about “PC conspiracies” and bigoted leftyism when people answer back and force our right-whinging heroes to justify their words.
This article first appeared at All that is Solid
There has been for a while now a slowly rising tide of viciousness in the media (and in society?) whether it be populist and casual racism (Clarkson), anti-feminism (ref: Germain Greer / Bea Campbell), abuse and violence towards women (ref: Proff. Mary Beard) , hatred and victimisation of the poor (numerous examles) , and an overall anger against any form of reason or debate. This is not confined to the right wing media as it is seeping into the Labour Party as well. It’s as if the social scene were in is being re-painted by Hieronymous Bosch. I’m perplexed by it as I thought we had put the lid on these things. Presumably there are clever sociologists out there that can explain this phenomena ? And how we deal with it. Is it just the response to economic decline ? Loss of identity , or something more ?
Well when you have to make cuts to the bottom of society you first of all have to demonize them, then you tell everyone how proud you are off all the hard working and how you hate the scroungers the work shy the people who are sick disabled who you know could be doing something.
This then spreads to the thugs who see everyone but not themselves as the problem.
I also would not have used the real person in this picture if I’m right did he not just pass away.
Free speech is, among other things, the right to say controversial things without having your career ruined by the PC brigade.
And I say that as a socialist.
Fabricant etc are in the right here and our increasingly degenerate left is in the wrong.
The only thing left to capitalism now is self-serving hate. All the usual ideological mechanisms have failed as its ability to function crumbles away.
Something terrible is happening to society as a whole; the people’s behaviour is getting worse. Its not just stropiness, its downright unsavoury rudeness, bullying intimidating and menacing.
It affects all strata of society. Society is losing its ‘niceness’, its genteelness, its politeness; its becoming ‘nasty’.
I’ve not see that in my area most people are simple not interested in politics, until one day comes somebody who speaks for them, they may be white they maybe black but what they will say will mean we will vote them in.
People tend to get mad you will know about it, the water cannons Boris has bought will be parked side by side up his rectum, then you can say we are mad angry, but not yet we are only steaming at the moment.
Swatantra, do you have any real evidence for such a change, or just your impressions?
I’ve not noticed any deterioration in how nice or otherwise people are to each other. In fact I think it is probably better now than in the racist NF infected 70s when I was growing up and where kids readily divided into mutually hostile fighting tribes.
There is always a tendency however for one generation to rose tint their past compared to the present day, be that behaviour in schools (overall probably better now than when I was a pupil), or musical tastes.
But in relation to the attacks on women in social media type comments, yes, these seem to be getting worse. However, I can’t help thinking in part at least that this is due to the nature of online comments themselves where things that once were kept inside an individuals head or said to a couple of mates in a pub and rapidly forgotten, are now out there for all to see. And you see a real level of stupidity now that was probably always their but in private rather than public. Not an excuse of course, but again I wonder whether ‘society’ is worse, or rather that the stone has been lifted up a little higher on the world on various social inepts and bedroom keyboard warriors.
But there is now what seems like an orchestrated war against the unemployed and others on benefits. That wasn’t the case before, certainly not back in the early 80’s. There has been a real change in public mood against the so called “benefits culture”. It’s a meanness that I don’t recall existing when I was younger. Hard to say if this is caused by the press or if the press just amplify the public mood.