I quite like Jonathan Pie and maybe I just didn’t get this one but he seemed all over the place. Right wing government brings in Policing Bill, he rants about left wing “cancel culture”?
1 Like
That was my thought as well. They are not the same issue. One of them isn’t even an issue at all.
1 Like
Agree with @Klopptimist here; Pie is 100% correct.
By the way, I subscribe to both the Guardian and the Telegraph (as well as others) purely so that I can see things from different perspectives. This is one of the keys to understanding Pie’s synthesis.
4 Likes
He may be right about the issues individually but I’m still trying to understand how they linked in this example?
1 Like
The underlying theme is freedom of expression. Not sure how that isn’t clear? 
The Piers Morgan bit sums it up.
2 Likes
Piers Morgan didn’t have his freedom of speech impinged.
He expressed an obnoxious opinion, and his employers decided they didn’t want to employ him anymore.
He is still free to say what he likes. He just can’t say it on GMB anymore.
People who complain about free speech need to understand that freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from the consequences of what you say.
Ok, I don’t find “if you oppose the Government banning protest then you have to oppose people being banned on twitter” to be a comparable or compelling argument.
Individually I don’t disagree with either argument but together they do not logically follow.
1 Like
Because Pie is not just thinking about the here and now - he is thinking about what comes next - where ultimately this road leads.
The underlying philosophy of this current cultural movement has startling similarities to Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the 60s/70’s .The principal aim of which was to destroy the “four olds” - old ideas, old customs, old habits and old culture. This is, in many ways, is the road we are travelling upon and it does not end well.
I was berated on here some time back about drawing a comparison to the current “woke” culture and Orwells 1984 - I was told that the “thought police dont fucking exist” They do, and little by little, piece by piece they take our freedoms away - the right to protest, the right to express an opinion, the right to assemble, the right to justice and a fair trial and on it goes. As Cynicaloldgit inferred - you must know your enemy - sadly the woke culture is naively enabling the very people it should be pursuing.
Coming to a town near you…
4 Likes
Quite upsetting, thinking about it. I am quite fortunate to not experienced alot of asian racism overseas, just once in Australia and once in France but generally people are nice but these have to stop.
1 Like
You’re not alone. I think those boundaries that have traditionally identified people of a different race or creed are widening everywhere.
Be that english / French andvice versa, American /Mexican, Even English /Scottish. All these are widening as attacks in one area grows and the other then publicises the issue which only drives hatred back in the other direction. It does need highlighting but it feels like the world goes backward
Wow, just wow. He wouldn’t even bother to come up with a better excuse. 
1 Like
I think what you are experiencing is a drive towards a more equal society, and for people who are white, or male, or straight that involves surrendering some of their privilege, and that inevitably feels like they are being oppressed. And that’s it.
1 Like
Where? Because that certainly isn’t the case in England.
1 Like
It is slowly moving in that direction and has been for decades. It could move faster, but as we’ve seen recently, even a very basic suggestion like men should stop being fucking bellends to women, are met with cries of wokism, and the usual crying, snowflake manbabies complaining they have been unfairly treated by having this request made of them in some way. So maybe it’s going a fast as it can.
On Jonathan Pie, I’m usually with him on his political rants, but he has got a bee in his bonnet about freedom of speech, and more often than not he gets completely wrong. He occasionally makes good points, but his obsession with Wokism and offence is a complete blind spot.
Let’s review the Piers Morgan situation. He called someone who claims to have been suffering from a mental health illness a liar. When someone else used their freedom of speech to tell him he was out bang out of order, he stormed off from a show he was supposed to be presenting leaving his co-presenters in the shit.
Just the walking out should be a sacking offence.
In all liklihood, he knows that he has already got the GB News gig. He wanted to storm off and create a scene, and he wanted to create the impression he has been silenced or deplatformed because the kind of stupid cunts who swallow this stuff are exactly the people who he needs to follow him to his new job.
He is a massive, massive fucking tool. Jonathan Pie (and anyone else who is defending his right to call people who have had suicidal thoughts liars) ought to have a bit more of a think before allowing themselves to be pawn in his game.
7 Likes
i’m not disagreeing with you but it feels as though those that feel they are losing something are fighting back.
recently I heard another prize tool in the form of the Death Pencil called Rees-Mogg state that Welsh and Gaelic (Scottish and Irish versions) as foreign languages.
Instead of making a sympathetic point about that it is easier for the house of parliament to continue in English for the benefit of all the members he tried to make his usual nationalist quip about it.
It seems we have a rather large number of these fuckwits in all the wrong places to allow real progress.
4 Likes
Yeah, that’s true. And it’s completely expected.
There is certainly a sphere in which even good faith reasonable debate about difficult issues is shouted down by purists on one side or the other.
I hate that I know about it, but there is a story in the press here about the recently appointed EIC of teen vogue, a black woman, being forced to step down before she even took the position because of racist jokes about Asians she made on social media as a teenager some ten years ago. Among a significant number of people who even I am comfortable calling performative SJWs (as someone who many on here might consider a SJW) there is no room for debate over difficult questions like what is the bar for having redeemed yourself, in terms of the severity of the indiscretions, the context in which they were made (a teenager testing boundaries with inflammatory “humour”) and how long ago it happened. No, if you participate in this discussion you are on the side of the racists. If you remember the Pulse shooting here in Orlando, the initial narrative was it was a closeted gay muslim trying to atone for the impure thoughts he had about men. It turns out there was no legit evidence of this and he chose pulse because it’s location as the easiest nightclub downtown to get to from the Interstate (literally google maps chose it for him). Stories on the internet that have tried to argue this line of narrative, the one supported by the actual trial of his wife, result in mass uproar from the LGBTQ community and its allies for trying to “eliminate the lived experience of the community” and being homophobic.
Likewise, saying anything remotely critical about any policy of or relating to Israel and you’re immediately condemned in certain circles as being an anti-semite. This is a relevent example, because this attitude exists largely on the right, and illustrates the lie that “cancel culture” is a weapon of the left. Yes, the left, at least the online left, have third rail issues that have no room for debate, and that is toxic and, IMO, actually inhibits social progress. But likewise the right uses the term cancel culture (like PC, or its successor PC gone mad) as a weapon to use to distract from reasonable criticism of sometimes truly awful shit.
I dont the answer, but I recognize it is a real problem that gets in the way of making progress in the issues. I think the only thing that can be done is to realize the “online” anything community is often the worst form of a community (I love you folks) and is NOT real life.
9 Likes
Agree with you totally. The problem here is that both sides cannot and will not accept that there are people who actually can disagree and be civil about it and have a meaningful conversation. The problem is never when individuals decide their own line to draw. Its when there are enough of such individuals to start a movement against the other side. Nowadays, people do not just want to disagree with you, they expect you to agree with them and then if you don’t, they want to destroy your family, livelihood etc.
Like the example you give about the woman who was sacked without even being in the editor job, even if I am Asian, I would say, has this woman being given a chance to talk about what she said when she was 17 and what is her opinion now. There is simply no room now for conversations to try to understand both sides of the stance. A very good example in tiny Singapore in just the past week is a column written by an university student writing on the woke and cancel culture and how she admits she is not the most knowledgeable in the transgender issues and like to understand more but that the woke and cancel culture would not allow her…and guess what, the barrage of attacks on her in social media was relentless, meant to destroy her, not just to disagree with her and her professor who submitted this article because she thought it was a well balanced piece just wrote, you people had just proven her right.
Its just so frustrating for people to say its either you agree or you are not human, you are as good as hiltler blah blah blah. There is simply no more lines anymore. Its my line and as long I can get enough people to agree thats the right line, then everybody needs to agree.
2 Likes
Following on from the discussion in the breaking news thread, in which it was suggested that the Sarah Everard murderer was just a ‘bad apple’.
1 Like
Hell of a difference between institutional sexism and common-place inappropriate sexual misconduct and murder.
1 Like