49 - Nick Cohen - The Left and Its Discontents
Two for Tea Podcast
English - March 02, 2020 22:12 - 1 hour - 91.1 MB - ★★★★★ - 52 ratingsNews Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Nick is the author of five books:
Cruel Britannia: Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous (1999):
https://www.amazon.com/Cruel-Britannia-Reports-Sinister-Preposterous/dp/1859842887
Pretty Straight Guys (2003):
https://www.amazon.com/Pretty-Straight-Guys-Nick-Cohen/dp/0571220045
What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way (2007):
https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Left-How-Lost-its/dp/0007229704
Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England (2009):
https://www.amazon.com/Waiting-Etonians-Reports-Sickbed-Liberal/dp/0007308922
You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (2012):
https://www.amazon.com/You-Cant-Read-This-Book/dp/0007308906
Further references
Zubin Madon’s podcast on the history of totalitarism can be found here:
https://medium.com/@ZMadon/flirting-with-fascism-podcast-70c6296a3f21
Timestamps
2:33 What things have stayed the same since Nick wrote What’s Left? The anti-western left. The criticisms he received after publishing the book.
5:58 Is this just left-bashing?
7:25 The leftist arguments against Jeremy Corbyn
9:36 The rise of the illiberal right
12:46 How the fringe can become the mainstream
13:35 Hindu nationalism and fascism
14:52 Brexit
18:40 The cult of Corbyn and the future of the British Labour party
25:31 Social media and news
32:46 Fatalism
35:39 The Iraq War
40:28 Pacifism
42:42 Bolivia
46:18 More on Brexit
48:32 Threats to freedom of speech
55:18 The UK libel laws
57:52 Moral relativism on the left