Monday 31 August 2009

Without Embarrassment

“The left always feel faintly embarrassed at attempting to promote their own political agenda”, says Steven Barnett, [1] professor of communications at Westminster University, without the faintest trace of embarrassment. Odd, I say, for I had thought that much of the success of leftism through the centuries down to the present day had been owed to the diabolical shamelessness of its promotion. I must have been reading the history and seeing the sights of another planet. Perhaps I ought to go back to university in order to learn how to communicate with this one, perhaps even without embarrassment.

[1] Quoted by Mehdi Hasan, “Bias and the Beeb”, The New Statesman, 27th August 2009.

6 comments:

James Higham said...

I really do feel the two are not contradictory, for in the paucity of realism in Leftist ideas lies the necessity for their trumpeting.

xlbrl said...

I have known personally a few people who are literally not capable of the emotion of embarassment, but a very few. It takes time to understand that this is what it is, and what it means. Opinion and characteristics remain fixed, and they arrange everything around them to fit instead.

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugliness in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there--Eric Hoffer

Derby WEA said...

As you note, embarrassment is not usually an attribute one associates with the left. Only this week, for example, I opened a job application and under 'Interests' the candidate wrote "Literature. Travel. Protest." One could hardly fail to be persuaded by such modesty.

dearieme said...

Did Steven Barnett manage to stifle a grin?

Deogolwulf said...

"Literature. Travel. Protest." And he wanted you to employ him?

Derby WEA said...

He probably thought he had submitted a "value-added" application. How wrong he was, poor thing.