Think Before You Speak

[poliphilo]

Ailz has quit Facebook because she was tired to getting into spats with feather-bedded young people who think the poor would stop being poor if only the State treated them harshly enough. Take away their child benefit and- hey presto- no more children living in poverty- that sort of thing. Is it just my neighbourhood or are today's young people a lot more right-wing than we were?

It so happens I ran across a quote from Marx this morning. Boiled down to its essentials it was saying that the morality that obtains in any society is the morality that serves the interests of the ruling class. So, for example, it isn't theft to enclose common land but it is theft to poach a rabbit or a deer from the land-encloser. It makes you want to spit, doesn't it? Or at least it does if you sit down and think about it.  Only people don't think. They just swim around in the murk gulping down the intellectual fish food that drifts down from above by way of the Mail, the Telegraph and the BBC.

I seem to have Dickens on the mind at the moment but it strikes me that if only the feather-bedded young people would read him (he's easier than Marx) they might stop believing it was so cool to be cruel.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't think the present order of things is going to last much longer. We lurch from financial crisis to financial crisis and sooner or later the whole culture of bankers and neo-conservatives is going to go over the cliff. It won't be pretty, but maybe what comes afterwards will be better.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

That said, I thought it'd gone off the cliff pretty terminally at the end of the Thatcher/Major era, but no, here they are again like a damn bad penny because people, knowing what they are and what they do are fool enough to vote for them. And all in cahoots with Clegg and co, although I suspect the Fib Dems have doomed themselves come the next general election.