Lionel Shriver: The age of mania
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- Опубликовано: 17 апр 2024
- Lionel Shriver - author of the new novel, Mania - returns to The Brendan O’Neill Show. Lionel and Brendan discuss the collective derangement behind lockdown, climate alarmism and the trans ideology.
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If Titania McGrath has taught me anything, is that when someone parodies the left, they take it as a challenge to make that reality.
Absolutely gobsmacked that she would consider voting for Biden!!!! Doesn’t make sense at all. Please reconsider.
Love Lionel Shriver!!! Also don’t agree with 100% of her opinions, but who wants that anyway. I’d loooove to be her friend… crazy me! 😅
There’d be few jokes. She is devoid of mirth.
We live in insane times. If the damage weren't so serious, it would be risible.
It's not just "working class" people who are against this. Most people are, they just keep their mouths shut in public.
I don't agree with Lionel on everything but I agree with a lot. But that's the point isn't it? Debate, discussion, openness to the views of others. Oh and critical thinking!
Debate, discussion and critical thinking are being systematically destroyed by the new Ma*xists who have captured academia and the media.
Indeed. I don't agree that Biden is on equal footing to Trump in terms of undesirability. Trump's got a lot of baggage to be sure, but Biden has been an abject disaster in every respect. Life was much better under Trump despite his big mouth.
Are you people attempting to be intellectuals? There's a curious mixture of school girl crush and unintelligible verbiage in your reactions. Shriver is not a major novelist. She left the States, left England and won't last in Portugal. Getting a lot of air time on right wing forums.
@@user-lh9ei6he1h I don't care about Shriver, she's just a messenger. I care about her message being correct right now. We live in insane times (largely the fault of the Marxist "Progressives" and their useless idiots carrying water for them like Biden), with very bad repercussions for the future of the U.S. and of Western civilization. I say stop the "Progressive" insanity before it's too late.
@@user-lh9ei6he1h Who cares about Shriver not being "a major novelist"? What matters is her message, which is correct and timely. We live in insane times with very serious long-term consequences.
Lockdown: "Suddenly, that was what every country was doing" Not Japan, Ms. Shriver. There was no lockdown, and no mandatory vaccinations. People worked out their individual "safety first" responses to the epidemic. Japan had one of the world's lowest death rates from Covid.
True but they are obsessed with masks. Heard politicians were trying to convince ppl to stop wearing them
Japan closed its borders to foreigners for multiple years, forced its children to eat in silence at school ('mokushoku') and had a ~100% masking rate - even today, you will see many people wearing a mask walking alone outside or when driving a car. Their vaccination rates (especially booster rates) are among the highest in the world (a good thing). Severe peer pressure more than made up for relatively lax government enforcement.
...... And then they jabbed everyone......
And.................
--- Even the Japanese fell victim to the mania. It just took them in a different kind of way (I mean..... the masks were and still are mad over there, and their use has no basis in science but it is highly correlated with social signalling- something which Japan is DEFINITELY not immune to).
And tbh, that no lockdown response (like Sweden's) actually has more to do with the political structure than anything else. It was illegal for government to lockdown, as the constitution prevented it (i.e. it is legally mandated that public health measures remain separate from government mandate- which is a very intelligent systemic protection for the public.... but not something at all rooted in different social attitudes to covid).
@@hayleylongster4698 Likewise in the U.S. The mandates were unconstitutional, yet they went ahead with them and mobilized cancel culture and "misinformation police" against dissent. Not sure about it not being "rooted in different social attitudes to Covid" in Sweden. I think the Swedes took it more in stride, protected the elderly and folks with preexisting conditions, and the rest went on with their lives, understanding that eventual spread was inevitable given the contagious nature of the bug.
The whole house of cards is starting to crumble. I sat in on a presentation literally today where someone from the Comms team reported that over the last two years the topic which was least engaged with on twitter etc were posts about diversity and inclusion
This is already happening. If I say "that's stupid" at home, my daughter tells me of and says "daddy you can't say that, that's a BAD word!" they've been taught that stupid is a bad word at primary school! 😮
It could have been me speaking !! I have just watched Lionel's podcast - I left Britain and feel giolty about it. - Having 'escaped' 14 years ago - due to my disatisfaction with ' British life' - I look on now, and it has become increasingly worse. I feel so sad for England in particular ( not London - England ) and for the loss of the voice of ' the real people' - So very sad and worrying. I have a house abroad, which I live in, and which is ' futureproofing' in case my loved ones should need to ' bolt' - an eventality which is sadly and increasingly not too far fetched !!
I believe that the fact that there has been such extended ' peacetime' has added to the feeling of complacency and entitlement in younger generations - and the inability of many to see the ' peacetime invasion to which people should be ' woken up at what is happening around them today.
"If you can keep your head, when everyone around you is losing theirs...."
Whenever those horrendous days of lockdown are mentioned, all I feel is incredible RAGE.
Great stuff thank-you. You are both doing exceptionally important work and having more of a political impact than the average craven MP.
Ahhh, that was like bathing in sensibility! Thank you;)
❤❤❤
I always look forward to the discussions between you two, Brendan and Lionel. This topic of framing the media disinformation as mania is brilliant.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is an early study of crowd psychology by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841 under the title Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions
Or Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium.
I have that book 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
― C. S. Lewis
Great content and guest! Brendan is an excellent interviewer
I went to an all girl school. Truly, things get real wild among 800 girls, real quick.
It's called adolescence of course hormonal young people get wild.
Like a female Lord Of The Flies?
@@nellsybubI went to an all-boys Catholic high school in the NYC suburbs in the 80s.
I think I remember one fight in the cafeteria.
No "Lord Of The Flies" at all.
@@nellsybubFemales are more susceptible to emotional dysregulation as a function of hormonal drift. It's a biological fact. Deal with it. Then get synchronized, Ms. Wellesley.
Don't forget Brexit, the mania around that was pretty wild as well.
Still is
She's amazing. Can't wait to read her book.
A full hour of Lionel. Nice one Brendan!
1:00:00 Agree. This hysteria and mania of man-hating has damaged families, relationships, and led most men to avoid any contract or only superficial contact with women. Just led many men to treat women even worse by having s*x but then ghosting them because its too risky to get involved or committed longterm. Unintended consequences are often much worse than the ills the response originally addressed.
Makes me question whether these outcomes were actually intended..
Her novels are excellent.
LS is a brilliant, objective commentator; always a joy to harken unto. I await eagerly delving into the chapters of her new book.
p.s. Never for one moment would I consider myself as being of equal intelligence to that of LS.
Thank you so much for this! Love from Mexico 🇲🇽
I like the way Shriver’s mind works and how she spoke out during the covid mania: she did get vaccinated though: I also learned something about public intellectuals
Ms. Shriver is no longer young. The older you are, the more susceptible to Covid. Best not to take chances. Forcing the vaccinations on younger people is another matter entirely.
The ‘Dancing Plague’ of 1518 which broke out in Strasbourg saw a bizarre contagion of hectic dancing which drew many in its wake. By the end, hundreds of people had joined the fray, dancing to exhaustion and even death. Originally thought to be the effect of poisonous grain, historian John Waller argues that this was more likely a weird social mania. It was eventually ended when the church built a special shine to St Vitus, an early Christian martyr who underwent the torture of being put in a cauldron over a fire. The dancers wildly cavorted up to the shine where they received a special new pair of red shoes.
Wow, that's interesting. I'm going to read up on this. Thanks for the info!
It would have been nice to see Ms Shriver.
What a rich conversation.
Few things: as a homosexual, I understand the disappointment parents would feel if their child can't continue the bloodline due to homosexualituly. That desire is deeply rooted in the human psyche.
I always had a problem with the term "homophobia". Some concerns are well-founded. To wit, the "slippery slope" argument seems to be bearing out, mostly notably with transmania, which was born from the "LGBT community" (which I disavowed in 2019).
As for "good intentions", there is always a shadow side involved: the animus directed at those on an opposing side of any issue of "good intent".
One Covidian told me that the unjabbed, like me, should be "exterminated like cockroaches".
Walking in LA in 2021, observing people walking around outside masked, I suddenly realized: "This is how governments can perpetrate atrocities against its own citizenry".
Absurdities should never be forgotten in the cultural amnesia of past manias. Living in Venice during 2020, I saw with my own eyes the skate park fillled in with sand. I believe the video exists here on YT.
What a stupid time to be alive.
This brilliant! I felt the same way.
Great discussion
I escaped to Mexico 🇲🇽 from all these manias. They do not occur naturally- there is always an agenda behind them. I was a student at U of T when they started pushing the eating disorders. I was blessed to have been able to discern what was happening. I was lucky enough to be a student of professor Edward Shorter, a historian of medicine and Pharma industry.
Two of Shriver's novels are already favourites of mine, We Need To Talk About Kevin and Game Control
Mandibles is also very good.
I am so glad to have been in the southern US during the Vid.
I'm pretty sure Vonnegut wrote this story quite some time ago.
Particular book you have in mind?
@@FreedomandMagic Short story, Harrison Bergeron.
@@ferulebezel i'll check that out
My first thought, though I'm sure Shriver's is a needed update.
Great conversation. Love Lionel. No mention of the vaccine mania when discussing the lock down mania though. Vaccine mania, Brendan? Brendan? No? oh OK then.
Yes! The elephant in the room.
She was on the culture show I think or some BBC radio show. To be fair the presenter respected her position and it was very interesting. She also writes in Un Heard.
I don't think it's so much about people trying to gain status by adopting these attitudes, but people afraid of losing status among their peers. Afraid of being thought of as having the wrong politics and thus not being accepted, which of course is something that none of us want and find very difficult, including myself. I lost a lot of friends and even acquaintances over transgender because even though I'm gay myself, or maybe because of it, I knew from experience that the whole thing was being blown out of proportion and that transgender was a very very rare thing and not the common phenomenon it was being presented as. I was seen as a monster for being against medically transitioning young teens and children. But I knew I was right and I just couldn't go along with the mania, even though it was very painful becoming a pariah among practically everybody I knew. And that's why these manias are so destructive and so malignant.
I will order her book!
P.S. You should allow people to leave Super Thanks!!
I read The Mandibles just a few months before we locked down hard here in Spain and I have little doubt that it tainted my thoughts during those dark days. I'm not sure I want to read this new book.
Agreed with everything said by Ms Shriver in this interview, but at the end her TDS reared its ugly head again. I cannot imagine how a person as perseptive and well-informed and engaging as Ms Shriver can actually say that one of the reasons she would not vote for a given candidate was because she disliked him personally. As a participant in representative democracy through the voting box, that seems to be such an immature and frivolous attitude. Voting should be soley based on the expectations that the candidate will achieve better societal and economic results for your particular country. Her childishly extravagant decision to place personal likeability so high in her voting criteria is a glaring contradiction in her stated fight for competency.
Sanctimony ought to be a terminal condition
It's good to see there's still people with common sense on the left. Makes one hopeful that we will one day be able to talk to each other again.
It's truly absurd. People delighting and relishing being bovinely obnoxious, openly spouting the most moronic nonsense. I can't believe for certain that they actually believe what they argue for and espouse. Which is scarier, effectively performing for approval or being genuinely batshit crazy?
Lionel was not on my radar before Covid, but she has shown her self (along with Brendan & Spiked) to lack not one wit of the courage of the kid tugging on their mummy's sleeve to ask why the Grand Emperor has no clothes. After this, I've had to readjust considerably my star map for navigation purposes. You don't need many lone stars, but you need a few to navigate.
Good luck with your heart surgery if the surgeon is a DEI appointment.
She would vote for BIDEN???
She DID mention having possible blind spots ?🤷♂️
Weird woman for sure - full of contradiction
We're already there. Compare the careers of Allen Bakke and Patrick Chavis.
I live near Buxton and that lake is not really a beauty spot its a very dangerous alkaline like with a PH level similar to bleach, fully on board with everything you are saying about the nuts covid times and how nuts police went and generally are now, but thats just an old quarry. Think from certain angles it was instagrammable is the issue.
Awe , how cute
Lionel Shriver believes these manias are coming from a “good place” 😂
🥱
Lionel has internal misogyny. She conveniently did not talk about Anita Hill.
48:30 Like many other things the "trans rights" abuses compassion for people in a bad situation and the extension of the civil rights discourse onto fields where it does not really make sense. (The latter should be clear from the fact that virtually nobody, no matter how much on board with civil rights in 1975 or g*y rights in 1995 would have promoted cutting up children or having men beating up women in women's sports.) It's an abuse of decent ideas transformed insanely into fields where they don't belong. But that trick makes it easy to brand any opponent as hopelessly backwards and something like a slaveholder or n'zi.
What is that on her face in the thumbnail?
Looks like a smile, I didn’t think she knew how.
You are voting for the vice president in each party.
Look at current far left discourse, they do indeed talk about the need to get rid of "intellectual ableism"
On trans kids and their parents around 26 sounds like munchhausen by proxy 😮
Man made climate change Brendan wha wha bit of a weak point wha
Her novels are tripe and vinegar.
I usually like Brendan O'Neill as an interviewer, but there are times when he really should push back a bit more rather than agree with everything the interviewee says. (Case in point: his interview last year with Balázs Orbán, the political director to the prime minister of Hungary). Shriver suggests that identity was the sole, or at least the main, criterion in appointing members of the Biden cabinet. Sure, it was an important consideration as he wanted to position himself as the most progressive president since forever, but certainly it wasn't the *only* one. Obviously, *all* aspects are considered, including the candidate's education, experience, and accomplishments. Shriver insinuates that some of them might be underqualified for the job for which they've been hired, ignoring the fact that there are a *huge* number of highly talented and accomplished minority professionals out there to choose from. She complains about oversimplification (re: the MeToo moment), but engages in quite a bit of it herself.
Meant to say that it's remarkable that Brendan O'Neill, a self-declared free speech advocate, interviewed a high-ranking government official from what is currently Europe's most illiberal country, Hungary, and asked zero critical questions--no pushback at all.
The general consensus, and it's a broad generalisation, is that Shriver is not a major writer. Throwing herself into debates on the iniquities of the left is a puerile attempt at relevance. Sniping from the sidelines in right wing discussions such as these emphasizes the disconnect. The right is in retreat in Britain and thank god Shriver packed her bags and left.
.
I like Lionel but I find her to be self-contradictory and surprisingly naïve at times.
Self-contradiction: She spent half the podcast criticizing people for prioritizing 'status' as an explanation for endorsing the premise of 'trans children'. She then explained that her primary reason for her reticence about voting for Trump would be having to admit it. She said she wouldn't want to be associated with a certain class of American by another class of American. In other words, her 'status' within her class would be diminished by admitting she voted for Trump.
Naïve: In another interview she claimed that by voting for Biden she had been "victimized" by a "bait and switch". She complained that "Everything Biden promised he has gone back on..." as if this was an unpredictable and shocking outcome.
I get your point...... but you're also wrong on some level.
Why? Because she's willing to ADMIT it in public. She is honest about her..... baser instincts, lol -- maybe after the fact, but she is capable of self awareness.
People fully captured by these manias are not self aware AT ALL. You can prove them wrong, decisively, TO THEIR FACE, MULTIPLE TIMES, and they will STILL deny that they're under the influence of any force other than their own intellect. This is why we never get apologies from these people - or at least, we never get them wirthout qualifying 'cope', or tying themselves in intellectual knots, or cognitive dissonance, or gaslighting, or hedging etc.
She's an absolute nut. How can you challenge the election of a university president based on lack of IQ but believe that Trump is a worthy president.
I see her as a very smart and astute person with a blind spot called Trump. She has cultural cringe about him, and it stops her from seeing his importance in the fight against rising tyranny.