Owen Jones Profile picture
Jul 11, 2020 5 tweets 2 min read Read on X
"Cancel culture" is being used to describe everything from people disapproving of pedophiles to celebrities being criticised on social media.

It's become a means to protect the powerful and wealthy from being scrutinised for things they say or do.
A lot of what's called "the culture war" is just younger people trying to assert their different social and moral values over older generations who run most of the media.

A lot of older media types genuinely fear younger people as woke barbarians banging at their gates.
The essential truth of modern political debate is that younger people and older people now live on different planets. That's unprecedented: both Thatcher and Reagan won the youth vote.

My politics are based on class: this divide doesn't make me comfortable. But it's just a fact. Image
According to @IpsosMORI, in the 1983 Tory landslide, 42% of under-25s voted Tory, compared to 33% for Labour.

In the 2019 Tory landslide, 62% of under-25s voted Labour compared to 19% who voted Tory.

You can't understand modern political and cultural debate without those facts.
For those asking for the full debate about "cancel culture" with Toby Young, here you go!

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More from @owenjonesjourno

Apr 27
Trans women legally obliged to use men's toilets, trans men legally obliged to use women's toilets.

Trans people are not going to do this. Every visit to the toilet would be humiliating, at worse dangerous.

In practise, it means trans people not using public toilets.
What happens to your life if the very act of using a public toilet becomes a source of fear or panic?

Well, it largely means you don't leave your home unless you really have to. You don't go to pubs or bars or cinemas or theatres. Do you even go shopping?
If you *only* consider the question of toilets, and nothing else, Britain has been turned into a hostile environment for trans people.

Britain is now the most hostile country to be trans in Europe, other than Russia or Hungary.
Read 13 tweets
Apr 18
Israel's lies about the massacre of the Red Crescent medics are comprehensively taken apart by Sky News.

Israel's initial lies, and subsequent lies, are taken apart.

This is important journalism.

But it isn't good enough. Here's why.

news.sky.com/story/two-hour…
Since the genocide began, Western media outlets have sporadically taken apart Israel's lies about atrocities it has perpetrated.

For example:

- The Flour Massacre

- The November 2023 attack on al-Shifa hospital

- The use of 2,000lb bombs in so-called 'safe areas'
Indeed, there have been enough Western media exposés to show that the Israeli lies and lies and lies again about war crimes it commits.

The problem isn't just that these rebuttals are too infrequent, too late, and lacking in prominence.
Read 8 tweets
Apr 14
Opposition to Israel’s genocide is a position shared by millions of people.

And yet there are some on this website who want to make it a fringe position, by imposing a purity test which would exclude the vast majority who oppose the genocide.
Even if you oppose the genocide, even if you support a total arms embargo and sweeping sanctions on Israel, the arrest of the entire military and political leadership, the creation of a single state with equal rights for all:

Even then, they will say you’re not pure enough.
There’s always been a small strain on the left, amplified by social media, who are driven primarily by being seen as the most radical person in the room, who think they can prove their radicalism by defining themselves against any leftist with a platform.
Read 16 tweets
Feb 25
We are getting to the point where we are increasingly normalising the idea that direct war with Russia is inevitable.

This will significantly increase the chance of nuclear apocalypse, in which the lucky ones will die in the initial blast.

It is OK to resist this.
There is no question that Vladimir Putin is a very unpleasant irredentist autocrat.

My question here is, leaving aside existing Western horrors inflicted on the world, if Donald Trump achieves his goal of annexing, say, Gaza and Greenland, are we going to war with the US?
Immediately even proposing this will provoke ridicule.

Well, why exactly? Is the suggestion we are going to war to resist foreign aggression, or only if certain countries are guilty of it?

War with the US is clearly ridiculous, but why isn't war with Russia exactly?
Read 16 tweets
Feb 1
Keir Starmer's aides openly brief that he is not actually running the country.

He's just the frontman for Labour's most right-wing faction, a bunch of unpleasant political gangsters who don't believe in much, apart from hating the left. Image
Fascinating how Keir Starmer's leadership campaign lying to and conning the Labour membership can be treated as just a throwaway line.

Rather than a scandalous act of deception, which drenched Starmer's political project in dishonesty from the start. Image
Long before the election, the deputy prime minister said the prime minister is "incapable of running a bath."

Being a good administrator was supposed to be Starmer's major selling point.

You can see how that's panned out in government. Image
Read 5 tweets
Jan 30
The public parading of detainees is indeed unacceptable.

If you're going to damn all Palestinian society for it, where does that leave Israel, which stripped little children to their underwear and paraded them in front of cameras? Image
"Human bestiality", says @faniaoz.

Let's talk about human bestiality.

Like an Israeli army which deliberately shoots children in the head and chest, as dozens of US-based medics testified.

nytimes.com/interactive/20…
@faniaoz "Human bestiality," says @faniaoz.

Read here how the Israeli army deliberately murdered the terrified 5-year-old Hind Rajab, her four cousins, her aunt and uncle - then the paramedics sent to save her.

forensic-architecture.org/investigation/…
Read 18 tweets

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