A new word for a new year
You know about the Overton Window - the range of acceptable arguments and ideas we consider 'mainstream' politics?
It's all about a tendency to shift - not always to the 'right' - bringing ideas that were once considered 'extremist' or unthinkable, or even offensive, into the daily discourse of politics and plausible policy.
Have a cynical new word: a 'Nileogism', if you will...
The Underton Window.
Not a shift to the right, nor to the left: a movement downward into stupidity and malice.
We are increasingly accepting ideas and behaviour in politics and public life that are corrupt and destructive; and worse, stupid.
Some of our public figures today are, quite simply, thick. Dimwitted, denialist, delusional: dangerous.
Who ordered that? Corruption isn't new, but I do (or did) expect it to be accompanied by low cunning; and deliberate malice, rather than damaging greed, needed to be concealed in clever deceits and distractions because it was, rightly, regarded as a shameful character flaw.
A substantal fraction of our polity are okay with Gamergate - which is still 'in play' as an organised engine of political malice - and there was once a time when those who did it, and any company or party who facilitated it - would've been reviled in public and faced legal and economic consequences.
This isn't a 'Left' or a 'Right' thing: it's a downward movement, a descent from decency. It is, quite literally, degrading: and it's within the 'window' of acceptability - mainstream, on prime-time TV and respectable media - and we are, collectively, pretty much OK with it.
Bar a few cranks who are out of touch, out of the mainstream, eccentric or even extremist: you know, just like the people and ideas that were commonplace forty years ago, and we now consider to be well outside the Overton Window.
This is a copy of my post here, on Dreamwidth, which has
comments. OpenID will allow you to comment there from your LiveJournal session: contact me if you have problems.
It's all about a tendency to shift - not always to the 'right' - bringing ideas that were once considered 'extremist' or unthinkable, or even offensive, into the daily discourse of politics and plausible policy.
Have a cynical new word: a 'Nileogism', if you will...
The Underton Window.
Not a shift to the right, nor to the left: a movement downward into stupidity and malice.
We are increasingly accepting ideas and behaviour in politics and public life that are corrupt and destructive; and worse, stupid.
Some of our public figures today are, quite simply, thick. Dimwitted, denialist, delusional: dangerous.
Who ordered that? Corruption isn't new, but I do (or did) expect it to be accompanied by low cunning; and deliberate malice, rather than damaging greed, needed to be concealed in clever deceits and distractions because it was, rightly, regarded as a shameful character flaw.
A substantal fraction of our polity are okay with Gamergate - which is still 'in play' as an organised engine of political malice - and there was once a time when those who did it, and any company or party who facilitated it - would've been reviled in public and faced legal and economic consequences.
This isn't a 'Left' or a 'Right' thing: it's a downward movement, a descent from decency. It is, quite literally, degrading: and it's within the 'window' of acceptability - mainstream, on prime-time TV and respectable media - and we are, collectively, pretty much OK with it.
Bar a few cranks who are out of touch, out of the mainstream, eccentric or even extremist: you know, just like the people and ideas that were commonplace forty years ago, and we now consider to be well outside the Overton Window.
This is a copy of my post here, on Dreamwidth, which has
comments. OpenID will allow you to comment there from your LiveJournal session: contact me if you have problems.