2022
Our house has apparently had enough of those Donny Downer negative lateral flow tests, and are going to be positive, positive, positive instead!
“All social media has taught us is that there are a lot crazier people out there than we realised. Years ago, they were at the end of the bar; now they have a platform. But we should just walk round them as we did before.”
The person sitting in front of me on the train has a coffee that smells so good it’s almost torture. ☕️
The reality of Partygate
Martin Fletcher in the New Statesman:
Partygate is not about left versus right, or Remainers versus Brexiteers. It is about decency versus indecency, honesty versus dishonesty, right versus wrong. Mirza, educated at an Oldham comprehensive, gets that even if Rees-Mogg, educated at Britain’s most prestigious public school, does not.
Exactly. If Johnson continues clinging on, he and his moral vacuum of a circle will continue undermining whatever good reputation the Conservative party has left.
Why political activists spend so much time fighting their own side
Note that Ataöv suggests that differences don’t cause conflicts; conflicts create differences. Members of a group seize on differences in order to affirm their own identity. A feedback loop ensues: differences are invented or enlarged, which stimulates further animosity, which magnifies differences, and so on.
And
There is evidence that political radicalism correlates with high anxiety, which seems to push people towards the security of a rigid political identity. Some folk just get very anxious if they don’t know where the boundary between their group ends and the other begins. They want to be able to say I’m with these guys. And that often means saying, I’m definitely not with those guys standing next to me.