http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-10633782

Asks Jon Kelly, of BBC News. So, is he right..?

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No, he isn't, and I can hardly bring myself to look at the BBC's new butt-ugly website design.

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"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
Voltaire

Interesting article, I think he's got a point.

Another interesting issue are the aging left wing lefties stuck in the 1970s and who still believe the Labour party is a progressive, socialist political party.

I can hear that whining noise again...

Must be my age.

Hmm, I never expected you of all people to contribute to a thread about 'aging left wing lefties stuck in the 1970s and who still believe the Labour party is a progressive, socialist political party'

?????
I know you generally don't do punctuation because it's socialist or something, but could you have a stab at putting that into English?

Is that a half-arsed attempt at sarcasm, or a statement of some sort that I just don't understand? Or just plain snottiness (as per)?

For fuck's sake, get a room, you two!

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"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
Voltaire

Off.

I like that comment. Innit.

'S well good. Wicked.

I massively agree with that post too.

People simply trot out this tired cliche because as they get more comfortable and rich, they also stop giving a shit about others, and rather than feel any guilt about that, they try to project that others who still maintain a progressive, idealistic view are the ones in denial, not themselves. Everyone wants to be seen as a nice person, so this is just their excuse in order not to embarass themselves by publicly declaring that now they're happy, they no longer care about anyone but themselves anymore, and thus have always been a massive hypocrite.

By all means, become a selfish, insular, uncaring greedy fuck as you get older, but at least be honest about it.

Apologies for mixing metaphors, but people become conservative as they get older simply because the more they start to benefit from an existing system, the less incentive they see in rocking the boat, less they fall off the gravy train.

I think I made a reverse journey. I was brought up in a Mail subscribing household and my mother, as I have said before, thinks the only thing wrong with Thatcher is that she was a bit of a leftie, and I tended towards the right wing even at university. It's since I started doing legal aid work and seeing just how appallingly the most vulnerable people get treated that I moved steadily leftwards.

I always believe this - that the more of society and the world at large you are exposed to, the more left you must rationally become.

As people get older though, it's rare that their world expands. Normally it contracts, as people get married and settle down and move away, most people end up in a steady job and community, surrounded by people in similar situations and with similar lives. Not confronted anymore with any inequality or scarcity, they start to look inwards and become obsessed with petty and trivial grievances and lose all perspective, because there is no longer any comparison, apart from demonised 'others' in the media.

That's why they become right wing, not because they gain any perspective or critical faculties, but because they steadily lose them both as soon as they start to settle.

The mantra that lefties go into such vocations as social work and the arts isn't nessecarilly true by that logic, but just that any open minded educated person couldn't really fail to become left-wing when faced with injustice or new ideas every day.

"It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea" - R.A. Wilson

I agree with the contracting world hypothesis. Most people look for stuff that forms a nice comfy womb for themselves. More so as they age and have to contend with stuff that would kill idle students, who have more time to worry about stuff that's, like, SO UNFAIR

I'm fortunate in that I collided with some ideological barriers that knocked me perpendicular to the mono-dimensional left-right axis. There's a better view from up here. And you can gob on people's heads.
Weeeeeeee

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