So you don’t read people you disagree with? Do you at least read the CliffsNotes version to know if you actually disagree with them?
To be fair, not uncommon, which is why my party trick of attributing Mussolini quotes to Marx to see what someone really thinks works so well.
An article in today’s Jewish Chronicle mocks Owen Jones for pretending to think that anyone who has a copy of David Irving must agree with it. (h/t Guido).
A year ago I posted about a similar imbecile attitude in the BBC.
Niall: thank you for putting me back in touch with Stephen Pollard, whose blog i used to look up in the late 2000s.
One message from the article you link to, can be summarized by quoting Sun Tzu:
When we moved house, a couple of years ago, there came a point when books were extracted from the boxes into which they had been placed according to size and put into rough piles according to how they would be shelved.
I happened to notice Mao’s diminutive tome, atop a slim hagiography of Stalin, which sat on a copy of Mein Kampf and remarked “As you see, the size of the book is inversely proportional to the number of victims “.
Attributing Obama quotes to Trump is a good party game too.
It’s not just that people don’t read the opposition viewpoint. They don’t even recognise their side from only a few years back.
Because most political positions taken by actual live politicians are 90% bullshit covering a small nugget of actual policy, those quote misattribution games work in all directions.
I know I would be hard put to correctly attribute any number of things said by Obama, Bush, Clinton, Romney, Pelosi, etc.
Trump is a bit of a different animal, of course, because of his unique oratorical style. Anything with a “huge” or “bigly” or “really, really great” in it is bound to be him 🙂
Strange that someone lambasts another for having a book by a holocaust denier, yet remains a member of a political party that has holocaust deniers in its ranks.
Just when I think the left can not get more like the Fascists (their supposed enemies – but really just rivals for power) they do.
But it is not just the official left.
Someone at the level of Michael Gove is too powerful to be kicked out of the Conservative Party, just as Boris Johnson can talk about Muslim women dressing like “letterboxes” without fear – but ordinary members could not get away with any of this.
“There a photograph of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” on your book shelf – you must be AGAINST THE NHS, do not bother denying the charge, you will not be allowed to attend your own trial”.
Do not laugh -that is the Central Office attitude. Owen Jones might as well be running the place.
You can tell the Mussolini quotes only by the fact that they are short and makes grammatical sense. You can tell Marx quotes by the many ellipses lost in speech, but apparent in written text, because Marx is so tiresome and long winded. The evil of Fascism was taking socialism and utilizing capitalist marketing and PR methods.
Actually, at this point it’s worth remembering that Mussolini was a power within the Italian Socialist Party and that the Fascist Party was started by him after he lost a faction fight within the Socialists. So it’s not as though Fascism and Socialism were ever really all that different.