Re: Bleeding-heart liberal do-gooders
 

From the poll results can we conclude that the members of cable forum are predominantly conservative and hostile to the guardian newspaper?

It'll give me an excuse for loosing arguments in the future ;)

Re: Bleeding-heart liberal do-gooders
 

I'm hostile to ALL the newspapers.

Re: Bleeding-heart liberal do-gooders
 

It certainly looks that way ... ;)

I think the majority of people in the UK are instinctively right-of-centre in their thinking anyway. Remember no Labour Government has ever managed to serve two complete terms in office. This one looks like being the first and they've had to steal the Tories' clothes in order to manage it.

Re: Bleeding-heart liberal do-gooders
 

Don't forget there is a clear disctinction between a "do-gooder" and someone who "does good" IMO anyway. The way I think of it is something like this: Someone who does good, is like a charity worker. A problem exists and they help to rectify it. A "do-gooder" is someone with too much time and money and not enough common sense. They won't fix existing problems, but cause their own. Like the one about the school with the three little pigs books.

Also the left political side is split into two: the liberals and the socialists. So it is unfair to say the left is only one of the two. They are a mix of both.

Re: Bleeding-heart liberal do-gooders
 

Out of the three terms in 'bleeding-heart do-gooder liberal' only one is likely to be used by the subject of the accusation. Since the only use of the phrase is pejorative, the other two must therefore be made up by someone hostile to the idea of trying to do good, empathise with other people and have a live and let live attitude.

In this country the most vociferous opponents of such attitudes are found in the right-wing press (think Littlejohn, Wade, Dacre).

Hence logically the term is a smear by the right-wing press.

Gosh. Good thing that questioning attitude isn't more prevalent, Kevin. What kind of society would we be in if people actually asked for proof of accusation.

Me, if anyone's interested?

I'm not an outreach co-ordinator, nor am I going round libraries editing their content. I'm an engineer by inclination, training and occupation, and as such can see the damage caused by short-term thinking. However, all the short-termism I see emanates from right-wing thinking - that financial considerations are all that's important, that the way of financing something is more important than the thing itself (think PFI), that short-term profits are the only ways to go, that humans are a 'resource', that experience is unnecessary and sometimes downright unwelcome (cf Railtrack signalling policy), that regular maintenance is a waste of money, that you can win a war in three weeks and not worry unduly about the subsequent occupation, that history has no lessons for us, that lawyers and accountants should run the world rather than people who build things.

This thinking is much more prevalent amongst those in power (every British government since 1979 for instance and such thinking is *demanded* by large PLC shareholders) than any alleged do-good liberalism, which even those believe in it think is limited to areas without real power. If the school library where your putative Three Little Pigs is found is unusable due to Jarvis doing things on the cheap under a PFI deal, or the school being moved onto a smaller site at the behest of property developers looking for a quick buck, then the removal of one book looks rather small-time.

If I was being a conspiracy theorist, I'd posit that blaming a few small individuals for the ills of society is a classic tactic to shift attention from those who have been given responsibility but failed in their duty (are you listening Messrs. Blunkett, Bush and Blair). The best example I have is the fear of crime - we're more scared of muggers nicking a few quid and a mobile phone than a portly grey-haired fund manager in a BMW nicking our pension fund.

Re: Bleeding-heart liberal do-gooders
 

David Blunkett has thrown some new light on who the Bleeding-heart Liberal Do-Gooders are:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3872675.stm

They are 'The Liberati'.

According to this report, they are also known as:
'woolly-minded Hampstead Liberals'
and
'the yoghurt-eating, muesli-eating, Guardian-reading fraternity'

Re: Bleeding-heart liberal do-gooders
 

Can we have a law against inciting cereal and dairy hatred

Re: Bleeding-heart liberal do-gooders
 

:rofl:

Or inciting hatred based upon ones newspaper-reading habits (actually, not such a good idea, that would criminalise most of Liverpool :erm: )

Re: Bleeding-heart liberal do-gooders
 

Even though I don't agree with everything he said, could someone rep BBKing for me please...... :tu:

Re: Bleeding-heart liberal do-gooders
 

Done ;)

Re: Bleeding-heart liberal do-gooders
 

Ive noticed that too!

Re: Bleeding-heart liberal do-gooders
 

I think the way the Guardian goes about offering its opinion rankles with me more than most newspapers (except perhaps the so-called Independent, which I was beginning to respect until it started to go a bit mental a month or so ago).

The Daily Mail does the moral outrage thing very well, but it doesn't use its front page to tell you what to think (except when it occasionally runs a comment on the front page, which is always clearly labelled as such) or to suggest you're heartless or pathetic if you don't think a certain way. The Guardian and the Inde, on the other hand, are very good at adopting a tone of snide moral superiority even in items that are, ostensibly, straight reporting and not editorial comment.

Re: Bleeding-heart liberal do-gooders
 

I have to totally disagree, daily mail articles seem to be very closed minded and aggresive. And moral outrage entirely depends on the morality or the person in question.

Plus the editor was on desert island discs - he was a jerk.

Re: Bleeding-heart liberal do-gooders
 

Whereas the Gruniad is open-minded and easy going? :erm: ;)

'Moral outrage' describes a way of presenting one's point of view, so I was in effect agreeing with you (before you even said it :angel: ) that the Mail is aggressive in tone. All I was saying was that the Mail is very good at doing it. It's not a comment on what the morality of the Mail actually is. The Guardian could be equally good at moral outrage if it chose to be - it would just express outrage based on a slightly different set of morals. In fact, the Guardian chooses not to express its displeasure at world events by sounding outraged. I find its approach, typified by Polly Toynbee's front-pager after the wrangling over the Euro-Constitution was complete, to be deeply patronising. If the Daily Mail is very good at employing a tone of 'moral outrage', then the Guardian is equally good at affecting 'moral superiority'.

As an aside, I don't think there's a single national newspaper in this country whose editorial line on any major issue couldn't be guessed in advance. That's why it's possible to get an inkling what kind of worldview a person might have by finding out what paper they read.

Re: Bleeding-heart liberal do-gooders
 

Have you seen the front of today's mail?