I don't really understand, in relation to Gordon Bown calling the woman he'd just been buttering up a bigot, when people say, "Well, what do you expect?" as if we should accept that as the standard of behaviour. It's transparently clear from his actions that he is a loathsome hypocrite. He was caught out. An apology means nothing, since we know very well he would not have apologised if he had not been caught. He is apologising because he has no choice. The suggestions that have been made that he didn't really mean what he said are an insult to the intelligence of the public, added to the insult he has already made.
Although I basically live in a liberal environment, I think I just want to disown liberalism if it means cynical endorsment of the kind of hypocrisy displayed by Brown.
Not immediately around me.
He is a politician therefore he is by nature a loathsome hypocrite but what it also proves from the Mirror this morning that he thought she said F*** rather than Flock is that he was only pretending to listen to the concerns of a real voter from outside he Westminster bubble.Plus after seeing that bloody smirk as he stood outside her house I just wanted to nut him
Nemonymous writes:I apologise for making this comment.
Sorry I haven’t responded to these comments.http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/apr/26/dumbbell-attack-teacher-student-dieI feel like this incident is indicative of a particular malaise of our current time. That is the malaise of liberal hypocrisy. I’m speaking as someone who for a long time, rather loosely and lazily regarded himself as ‘liberal’. I haven’t really commented further because I don’t have any conclusions, only impressions and things I’m wondering about. With regard to the article, though, I think anyone who has been a teacher more or less recently has sympathy with the guy who tried to cave the teenager’s head in. Liberal hypocrisy consists in pretending that we live in an egalitarian society, when, in fact, we don’t. The basic infrastructure is the same, we’re just supposed to pretend that inequalities don’t exist. To put it another way, the model of education is still the industrial model that is meant to churn out automatons for employment. However, now it’s pretending not to be, so we get the worst of both worlds. The teachers are in an environment where they have to try and train children for an industrial society, or a corporate society, which is basically the same, but they are not allowed to have the authority actually to carry out this task in any effective way. The whole model of education itself has to be changed, otherwise teachers are caught in the middle like this, and become scapegoats because of a failure of nerve. The same failure of nerve that means standards have to be lowered to make students’ acheivements look better and so on. And this is Brown’s failure of nerve, too. He couldn’t say to the woman’s face that he disagreed with her. He had to fawn upon her in public. And then immediately he left her presence, he sneered at her. This is indicative of the entire liberal failure of nerve, of which I have also been a part.These, as I say, are not conclusions, but current impressions. I feel very much as if liberalism has now become a lazy ‘received wisdom’ and is a complacent means of shoring up the status quo.I want to depart from it.