Actually going to do a "thread".

A couple of friends recommended Waleed Aly's essay in The Monthly, "Woke politics and power", so I read it and I had a pretty negative response to it. I wrote a few numbered notes as I was going through it …

1. Aly is correct to note the prevalence of "cancel culture" as linked to the failures of liberal society and the relative disempowerment of individuals, as individuals, within it.

2. An early slippage happens when Aly claims "a generation that inherited the world liberals helped transform". Liberalism is a much older political ideology that emerged alongside the most intense periods of industrialisation and colonisation the world has known.

2a. Liberalism has its foundations in the assignment of certain formal legal rights, especially the right to own private property and sell one's labour—it's intimately tied to capitalism.

2b. Liberalism is the ideology of the Enlightenment and the British Empire, of both slaveowners and abolitionists. It assigns legal rights and status, but we know it inflicts terrible difficulty on many of the bearers of those rights.