w/e 22 July 2018

Nothing much to say this week, but here’s one thing that stuck in my mind.

From Stewart Lee’s article about realising he doesn’t need to listen to Morrissey any more, is this bit:

This isn’t the time for ambiguity, or irony, or publicity-seeking controversy. Those days are gone, and I miss them, as I am part of a generation that profiteered from the assumption that political correctness was a done deal, and now we could have fun jumping in and out of its boundaries, like street kids round a spurting water main. But the Nazi-saluting pug bloke has just joined Ukip so his racist dog doesn’t seem remotely funny any more.

If Breitbart or Spiked can roll out your comments approvingly online you have fucked up. Nowadays, your true intentions have to be written through every inch of your content, like the word Blackpool through a stick of rock, so at any point the useful idiots of the hipster “alt-right” and their fellow travellers in the opinion industry chose to snap it, it still can’t be repurposed. The trouble is, there’s no longer any way to make the case that Morrissey ever meant anything other than what he says.

I love that description of “your true intentions have to be written through every inch of your content, like the word Blackpool through a stick of rock”.

It’s not like I post much controversial or even generally political stuff on Twitter, for example, but I so often feel that everything needs to be caveated and footnoted in order to pre-empt criticisms from anyone who might stumble across it and take it out of context.

It’s not a new problem but it feels worse, or more frequent, now especially with media like Twitter that encourage snappy, brief, context less statements. It’s as if Twitter was designed to generate controversy and to maximise the chances of people getting the wrong end of the, er, stick.

Anyway, it’s nice to have the stick of rock analogy when I’m thinking about this.

Have a good week. Do something nice.