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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25699 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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I have a new post up on my Substack today, which is expanded from a comment I wrote replying to @FarNearEverywhere's comment (for which they won one of their whopping five AAQCs for December - congrats!).

Why do I find the premise of this novel so risible? It’s not just that the possibility of the Irish far-right seizing power and transforming the country into a fascist dystopia is so laughably remote as to be almost fantastical - if it’s a “warning”, then it’s of about as much use as a warning about a Dáil made up of a coalition of pixies and unicorns. It’s not just that, like most successful Irish writers of the last decade, [Paul] Lynch is clearly something of an East Yank whose political concerns were imported wholesale from across the pond - I would find this novel’s premise exactly as contrived and indigestible were it set in the US or Canada (for reasons I’ll get into shortly). No - it’s that Lynch is writing about a hypothetical authoritarian Ireland brought into being by a far-right administration, while ignoring the warning signs of actual democratic backsliding and authoritarianism ringing loudly in his ears every day.

...

“Freezing the bank accounts of anyone even suspected of having donated to a political cause you dislike, without ever arresting them or charging them with a crime” is the kind of behaviour we’d rightly expect from a Central African dictator. But it wasn’t a far-right Canadian prime minister who did such a thing - it was the genocide-apologising, knee-taking Justin Trudeau, who attends Pride parades and offered the smarmy explanation “because it’s 2015” for his decision to appoint a gender-balanced cabinet. Trudeau is living proof, if any were required, that there’s no conflict between a socially progressive worldview and repressive, dictatorial tactics straight out of the Erdoğan playbook - the iron fist in the rainbow glove.

"Leftists are the real authoritarians" plays about as well as "Democrats are the real racists". It is axiomatic that the right is authoritarian and the left is fighting against that.

The thing about that novel is, that the recent expansion of police powers and giving them extra equipment, plus the public sentiment starting to crystallise around cracking down on 'hate speech' and thus giving the government more remit for censorship (even if it's not phrased that way) is happening under a slightly right-of-centre economically but liberal and very social progressive otherwise government, not the stereotypical GOP administration as would be the case for such a novel in the USA.

Leftists can be authoritarian too, see Cuba for instance (if the examples of the Soviet Union and China are going to be No True Scotsmanned as not really being left, or not really being authoritarian) or indeed the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and The Shining Path in Peru.

The mainstream left is generally sympathetic to Cuba ("Look how great their health care is, shame on the US for not having single payer") and was sympathetic to the Sandinistas (if only because Reagan opposed them).

I’ve always been blown away by the obsession with health care. Does the average person spend more than a few days interacting with health care pa?

Per annum? Yes.

Schedule an appointment. Attend it only to get a referral for the thing you already knew you needed. Get a test ordered which has to be done across the county because reasons. Pay for all of these when you receive a bill months later, because the whole time, the provider and insurance are volleying back and forth on what will be covered and in what amount. If, during any step, you run into a bureaucratic hurdle, expect to spend an hour or two on the phone, because for some reason these companies all use voice-activated robot dialogue instead of a keypad or, God forbid, a website.

You can avoid most of this stuff if you’re young and healthy. America is not really either of those things, on average. Even the simplest brush with this system turns into a bureaucratic hassle. I understand the processes which led to this perverse setup. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could design it better?

Per annum. I get that it can sometimes be a hassle but that seems weird for relatively young people to base their seeming life or identity around, no?

How do you mean?

I think the normal level of engagement with the issue is something like “that guy says American healthcare sucks; my one experience with a chest x-ray concurs, so I guess I’ll vote for him.” If you want to get really spicy, share a meme or two about it on Twitter.

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