welfare state breakdown
- Thread starter trevhagl
- Start date
Are you sure you're well? You're lobbing derogatory comments like some mad alky in the street. Perhaps you're blessed with one of those creatative/depressive personalities? The sort of personality that exercises compassion for some abstracted strata of society compensated with a sanctimonious dismissal of others' values, casting them as "guilty" if you like, in which case they're undeserving of your kindness. It's a funny old personality conflict. How does it inform your political beliefs? I wonder.
and there's my last post proven for me....thanks
My pleasure. Tell us, do you think you might be slightly addicted to the chemical rush you get when your opinions are reinforced? Is that what the opening post was for? Seems so. As for "twats that talk gobbledegook", there must be fair number of them reliant on what remains of the welfare state for this or that. When you say you're not really compassionate towards them, I'm intrigued to know your motivation for defence of the welfare state if not as an expression of your advanced level of compassion or humanitarianism or whatever you might choose to call it.
if i was seeking acceptance i wouldn't have called you a twat.
I actually get more kicks out of people who ARGUE with me !!! Now where's El Jefe ???!!!
what are you going to be when you grow up dear?
"A pedantic bore who stalks the internet and uses lots of big words mam"
Yeah fair enough. Let me suggest that in enjoying an argument you're reinforcing your ideas like a body builder reinforces their muscles with resistance training. So what's it all about for you then trev, what's the core value, is it a matter of social justice?
yes. social justice in real terms not the fake thing New Labour use it as. I have seen the victims of their welfare clampdowns, people on the edge of suicide. You probably haven't.
Oh I have. You're a good person trev. When you see suffering, you feel suffering. It's not felt to the same degree by everybody else. Quite a few people take a degree of pleasure in others' misfortune. And, no, before you dismiss the thought, they are not sociopaths, evil, selfish or wrong. They just put their sentiments in a different hat. Look how once you’ve got it into your head that I’m guilty of this-or-that, or a “twat” or whatever, your compassion goes out the window. In your own way you’re as arbitrary and unjust as the system you’re ostensibly against. (And how are you against it? A tantrum here, a protest there maybe. The choreographed role of heroic advocate for justice and humanitarianism. A role as integrated with bourgeois society as any other).
You didn't write the lyrics for Bad Religion did you? You seem to have the same dictionary
What a load of shit.
oh dear and here he was hoping we'd find him very very clever!!!
Louis MacNeice
Autumn Journalist
Is it 1909? What's bourgeois society these days?
And in what way are your views not also 'bourgeois?'
On the contrary trev. I'm not sure I really hope at all.
I find you quite interesting. What does that picture mean?Still asever.
Louis MacNeice
Ok. One in which the working class defer social policy design to a strata of "experts". One where we're offered a false choice between competing ideologies and values that reflect a Victorian middle class tradition. Etc etc.
Genuinely, without wanting to be weird for the sake of it, I'm really not sure I do "views" at all. I think the whole idea of positions and opinions and so on is part of a kind of middle class tradition. It's not really about what's inside one's head. I think the idea of physical movement, real touchable objects and motion and that, is where it's at and stands against the bourgeois tradition where the undetectable internal magic of the mind is held in some reverence. You know, a bureaucratic mode of thought. When I meet someone, you know, I'm not that bothered by their oppinions or values or anything that goes on under the covers. I'm only really interested in the impact they're going to have on the material world around them. Two people can have completely polar ideas on this-and-that, as long as they go to work or whatever tomorrow and push the same buttons in the same order, they're not really different at all. They may as well be the same person. The rest of it, what one conlcudes given a guess as to their values or internal representations or experience or whatever, is just a figment of one's own imagination. As inconsequential as an unwritten poem.
Yes, yes-but as opposed to doing what? And in what way is a society like this 'bourgeois'?
You might not be sure that you 'do views', but most others seem to think you do. You tend to offer the same one post, in a number of slight variations, no matter what the subject.
What you write above, for instance, is pseudo-intellectual nonsense, but still you persist. Ah well.
As opposed to taking responsibility and action to make their lives what they want rather than pass the buck to some bourgeois for the situation in which they find themselves. Marching around protesting at the middle classes, when they didn't take power, we handed it to them to avoid blame. Seeing themselves as their own creators, master of their own history, not it's unwitting victims. I kind of agree that just slapping "bourgeois" on it is lazy, but I'm for lazy.
I dunno LLETSA. What other sorts of intellectualism are there? Show us some.LLETSA said:
Yeah well. Their awesome track record of success speaks for itself. You know, I was chatting to this chap the other day in the pub, and he was saying that he wouldn't chat up this-or-that girl because of his morality. Weird. I suggested that was a limiting belief he'd conjured up to justify his hard-wired beta male approach anxiety. I asked him, in what way did his beliefs, his morality, work to his advantage. In what way did it make him happy. He told me he couldn’t remember the last time he'd been happy. I had to tell him a little story to make him laugh, so he had a happy experience to anchor next time he wanted to fire a resourceful state. It was the story of Pegasus. Poseidon and the Medusa and that.
When did the working class 'hand power' to the middle class? Are the middle class in control of the country? Or the world?
What action do you suggest the working class takes? What outcome do you think the working class should be seeking? You never seem willing to say.
I called it pseudo-intellectualism because you always avoid everyday language to obscure the lack of any definable content in what you say.
You've just found youself a new career as a life coach.
I'm off to the pub myself now. I hope I'm lucky enough to meet somebody like you.
I dunno. It just comes out. It's not to disguise the lack of content. I kind of like trivial. Trivia was the Roman goddess of witchcraft, the three-way cross roads and the harvest moon. There are a couple of assertions I'd like to make here. First, how much meaning, how substantial or content-rich something is, as I'm sure you appreciate, is really a matter of how it speaks directly to our values and beliefs. Now, your good self and probably most of the people who knock about the political scene have well-developed black and white values. It's no wonder then that what I post seems to be contentless. I know from previous discussions that you’re the sort that sneers at the superficial and ditzy types in the media and that. Really, I just do my thing, and it's up to you find whatever content or meaning or whatever you fancy. It's funny really, because when I'm at work, I kind of do results and outcomes. It's all very cinematic. I've a reputation for being straightforward. I know it's hard to believe. Now I think about it, I'm not even sure you can really get objective content and meaning from some words. I'm more about the content and meaning of actual events, things you can take a photo of.
Second, I think this reverence that I've inferred you hold for content and meaning is fascinating. I indulge the idea that this value is part of a middle class tradition of thought. You know, looking for depth and meaning and content and that. It's like you're looking for for some real intellectual connection with an actual living breathing person. Now I occasionally go for that myself, but not on the internet. I'm pretty confused myself as to why I post here or anywhere. It's nice to be confused about something in my life. Novel. I really don't want or try to wind people up for the sake of it. It just happens. I don't know why they let it get to them. It's as if they're not in a position to choose their emotions. I mean, it seems somewhat masochistic to install a negative state in response to what one reads, it is dead interesting to me though – to see it play out.
Whenever they say "it's not my job, my place, to propose what to do to about it. I'm just a bit player in my own life. My role is to moan and be against this or that until someone cleverer than me makes things better". They do it all the time. I saw and heard several do it today.
In a sense I suppose they are. In so far as like the politicians and movers and shakers are mostly from middle class backgrounds and that. However, they're not superhuman machiavellian in-control types. We just imagine them as such. That's why we get so uptight when they let us down. They're just muddling through. The ministry of silly walks.LLETSA said:
Oh fuck me. If only I knew. What I'd like to see is a mass working class party of action, with a programme rather than a take on values. Know what I mean? I advocate a programme of territorial self sufficiency in food, energy and manufactured goods. I advocate the installation of new social institutions in place of those that currently prevail: neighbourhood assemblies, self managed enterprises, a citizen's income. I advocate we embrace the march towards the leisure society. You'll no doubt happily tell me there's no appetite for that. And fair enough. Makes no odds to me. If the working class want to wallow in their status anxiety, sexual frustration and riskless lives of routine and mediocrity, even in secular society, behaving as if they owe their lives to some magic creator (or even the welfare state or whatever) then it's just less competition for me when I'm chatting up birds innit.LLETSA said:
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