Here’s a sweet para:

‘But when you trace back through the debate, though, you find that attitudes soften over time. Successive waves of information and discussion didn’t just spread around the hard data that couldn’t be ignored. They encouraged people to refer back to their own experience, and open up conversations with people they know, conversations that couldn’t have happened before the whole country was talking about it..”

That is a good start in describing the watershed changes in our own politics at the moment. Once these conversations are being held, our community can talk about the way in which the political rhetoric of a certain leadership doesn’t match reality. Consensus develops under the radar, credibility shifts, and leaders go into free fall.

The quotation comes from Crooked Timber. Maria Farrell is talking about Irish politics, where cynicism takes a different form – as in

The title of this post – the Irish solution – comes from a cynical acceptance of double standards promoted during the 1980s that outlawing contraception and abortion in Ireland were fine, because you could always get them in the UK if you had the money.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Austrapolitics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.