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A. N. Owen's avatar

Calling anything you don't like "fascist" is something the left has done for a few generations now. The irony, of course, is that aspects of the modern left are much more fascistic than anything you see in the right, with their near-totalitarian attitudes towards thoughts and beliefs and righteousness.

I do remember, when blissfully working overseas during the chaotic Trump administration, popping into US commentaries and hearing people rant about how their lives were in danger because of Trump (not quite sure how or why but that wasn't the point). Always chuckled and returned to real life. Never occurred to me what I thought was pathetic paranoia of online nutters could actually turn into real life in its own way.

It could be that the rise of the internet and social media and 24/7 news cycles simply gave platforms for the political hypochondriacs to find each other, which intensified their attitudes. Now the most extreme can spend all day in their basements, on twitter and social media, railing against injustice and seeing evil everywhere. It surely is a form of addiction.

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StatisticsThomas's avatar

"Maybe those Turner Prize winners do genuinely feel unwelcome, I don’t doubt their sincerity"

That's why you're kind, and I am not. I doubt the ability of Turner Prize Winners even to recognise sincerity, let alone experience it. Everything I see from the hysterical Left looks performative, which I used to believe would be its downfall; again, of course, I'm wrong, since my lens remains resolutely pre-post-modern. The fact that everyone knows the artistic shrieking isn't sincere (other than kind Ed), that it's obviously fake ... doesn't matter in the slightest, not in the world these useless "artists"(/pop stars/ex-BBC commentators in leather jackets/junk food pushers who present BBC Sports/et too many al.) inhabit. Performance (to one's own tribe) is everything (because what else are you, some sort of Centrist dad/gammon/Karen/[insert insult du jour] who believes in *objective reality*? ). Does the BBC, for example, ever query such claims, which a toddler could poke to pieces, even while it gives them the oxygen of publicity and top-billing on its pernicious website?

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