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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25653 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?

If one’s a parent of small children or very aged, certainly.

I’m a parent of small kids. So we go to the pediatrician and it is very easy. No fuss. Don’t know why anyone would complain about that.

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