How to Be Right - James O'Brien Flashcards
Introduction
Double standards
Ardent - very enthusiastic or passionate
The true liberal is a cursed with a desire, even a duty, to understand other points of view. It’s a world view that admits disagreement and dissent but seeks to establish objective parameters by which the fundamental truth of things can be judged.
Bombast - high-sounding language with little meaning, used to impress people.
Hardly anyone is asked to explain their opinions these days; to outline not just what they believe, but why.
weapons-grade - of the quality or type that can be used to make nuclear weapons.
Divisive sloganeering and rancid rhetoric have gone unchecked.
Scapegoats for public sector failings
Racist claptrap
Barefaced lies - shameless and undisguised
The British media was breathtakingly complicit in portraying immigration as an unalloyed bad.
Toxic propaganda
Shameful weaponisation/demonisation of immigration
Islam and Islamism
A deliberate attempt to conflate Islamist terrorists with all Muslims
Insidious conflation move further into the mainstream
These positions are being regularly expounded in popular newspapers
Ignorant bile
The people who sow these bitter seeds…
The idea that ‘freedom of speech’ somehow equates with a freedom to spout undiluted, often inflammatory nonsense without being contradicted or called out…
People have lost the desire to question what they are being told. Their bespoke, unchallenged diet of ‘news’, augmented we now know by Facebook algorithms and deliberately fake stories, is so unvaried that the possibility that it might be largely bogus is never entertained.
Foment - instigate or stir up
White supremacist rhetoric is clearly resurgent
Invariably - in every case or on every occasion; always.
Hate-dissemination industry
Prevalent - widespread, common, usual
He is angry because he is being asked to think
Brexit
David Cameron’s towering hubris
Prevaricate - speak or act in an evasive way, beat about the bush, hedge, fence, dodge (the issue), sidestep (the issue), pussyfoot, equivocate
The Daily Mail led the unprecedented onslaught of vitriol, polluting public discourse for a generation
‘Enemies of the People’
‘Crush the Saboteurs’
Evidence of intransigence and ill will
Snake oil is a euphemism for deceptive marketing
Project Fear
Nonsense on stilts
If you don’t think about things, you will never understand them.
Theresa May took this aversion to thinking to its apotheosis when she declared that ‘Brexit means Brexit’.
It discourages thinking, avoids facts and postpones reality.
Throw them a fatuous soundbite, the thinking goes.
Malign dissenters as sneering elites, typify criticism as an accusation of racism and castigate questions as unpatriotic.
Hand-wringing - the excessive display of concern or distress.
Feed prejudices / harvest votes
Ape - imitate (someone or something), especially in an absurd or unthinking way; parody, caricature;
LGBT
Even the most passionately held prejudices are vulnerable to the simplest of questions.
The hate is actually more about the hater than the hated.
Schrodinger’s immigrant - the one who simultaneously steals ‘our’ jobs and claim unemployment benefit while leading a life of state-subsidised indolence.
Political Correctness
It’s fascinating to see people who are offended by pretty much everything. Millions remain perversely convinced that their free speech has been stifled.
Narrative of victimhood
Nanny States and Classic Liberals
Libertarians are an increasingly populous tribe. Twitter, for example, groans under the weight of borderline sociopaths and assorted self-important weirdos who describe themselves as ‘libertarian’ or even worse, ‘classically liberal’. Their uniting belief seems to be that because they are apparently capable of avoiding the dangerous consequences of unfettered ‘free choice’ - addiction, obesity, death etc - governments should not spend money helping less educated, less disciplined and less wealthy people to do the same.
It sits very comfortably with the weapons-grade free market position that nothing should ever be done in law to curtail the ability of businesses to make as much profits as possible.
In many ways, these positions are two cheeks of the same backside and both use the pejorative ‘many state’ to malign the idea that lawmakers should ever endeavour to protect people from themselves and the pitfalls of modern life.
Many right-wing inheritors of wealth and status cling so desperately to the notion that they have somehow ‘earned’ or ‘deserved’ their privilege, rather than arrived at it through dumb luck.
Americans sum it up best when they talk of people who ‘were born on third base but go through life thinking they hit a triple’. These ‘third basers’ seek to persuade themselves and others that these inequalities are not only justified but also somehow natural.
Fig leaf - a thing intended to conceal a difficulty or embarrassment.
‘Freedom of choice’ is used as a fig leaf to camouflage a callous commitment to an economic system which further enriches the already rich at the expense of the eternally poor.
The Age Gap
