Could Zack Polanski be any more of an obnoxious twat?

We see this here too, especially on the left and especially, it seems to me, amongst younger people. A complete intolerance of views that differ from their own, and a leap to make a moral judgement on the person, and cancel them.

Cf dear Zack and his openly expressed opinion that right-wingers should be shunned.

Slightly off-topic, but a recent study published in Germany reported that the supporters of the German Green Party were the least tolerant of differing political opinions.
I watched an interview with a German journalist discussing said study. He mentioned his own upbringing in a Green-leaning family and how in the 60s political debates were much more common and encouraged in these circles, whereas today dissenting views are viewed increasingly as unacceptable.

@Puzzledandpissedoff I think the greens can pull off some seats. Let’s be honest, some people voted for George Galloway! A bit of anti Jewish rhetoric snd there’s votes to be won. We all know where and it won’t be that difficult. Reform has a wider disaffected base but we end up wanting quick fix politics and vote for any idiot that promises it. It’s definitely true we have a somewhat dim population at times and of course 50% are below average! We cannot get votes for sensible long term strategies and as a result parties lie about what they can do which is mostly tinker at the edges. The big issues remain unresolved and the country gets poorer.

I do hope you're right. And previously I thought this too.

The student politics ARE ridiculous. Yet I see so many grown adults falling for them, despite them being laughably absurd, that I do wonder.

I used to have an ex who worked in a government type role, where the brief was to provide financial literacy education to the public at large. One time I expressed surprise at how simplistic/dumbed down one of the awareness campaigns were, and he explained it by saying "what you have to realise is that 50% of the population aren't able to calculate 50%".

If we're really dealing with that level of intelligence/education/skills in the general population it's a worry.

That all makes perfect sense, @MeetMeOnTheCorner and @BunfightBetty, but to my mind it's the ridiculous student politics which will ensure they'll never get anywhere near real power

Both the Greens and Reform are more shouty pressure groups than proper parties anyway, and as with Labour under Corbyn I sincerely doubt they could ever pull enough votes

I don't know. I think at grass roots level the candidates used to be well-meaning, slightly earnest eco-types, and Caroline Lucas used to speak about genuinely green (small g) issues.

Now, clearly, it's an umbrella party for racists, starry-eyed students with impractical ideas, and disaffected members of the hard left (with some considerable overlap between these groups, it would seem. Lamentably)

He is a humongous twat.

@Puzzledandpissedoff I do think Caroline Lucas was interested in green politics. The party has been hikacked by the far left and student politics. Want the earth but won’t pay! Everyone else running a business or having the temerity to earn money will be paying. Those not paying want everything but students don’t see this. Some voters are very suggestible.

The Greens are rotten to the core. I can't understand why anyone supports them.

I think we haven’t heard the depths of his twatishness. He is one of the most obnoxious twats ever.

It’s kind of similar to Mamdani it’s a type of politics that does win votes. Not sure how he’s going.

They don't seem the slightest bit concerned about actual green issues anymore ...

I'm not convinced they ever were, @BunfightBetty - most likely they just jumped on the "in thing" to get themselves noticed, but I wouldn't worry

Like Reform they may pick up protest votes at the local elections, but come a general one and I believe they'll be an irrelevance

Shocking. The Greens are embarrassing and sadly going to win lots of seats in May.

Just wanted to expand on my previous post. Polanski and other people who think that attempting to engratiate themselves with people who hate them because of their race should heed the cautionary tale of the French author Irène Némirovsky.
Irène Némirovsky was a celebrated novelist who had also authored a number of anti-semitic articles for far-right publications prior to WWII. She renounced Judaism, converting to Catholicism and conspicuously steered clear of including Jewish characters or themes in her work.
She may have thought that all this was enough to distance herself from the type of troublesome, subversive Jews the nazis were trying to eradicate and that by doing so she would ensure her safety. Unfortunately, she soon discovered that she was quite wrong when she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered in 1942. It turns out that, even though they were willing to use some of her writings for anti-semitic propaganda purposes, the nazis still viewed her as a filthy Jew who needed to be disposed of, meaning all of her attempts to appease the people who were always going to hate her for her ethnicity, no matter what she did, completely pointless.
This phenomenon is not exclusive to Jews. I am sure that Reform have members from immigrant backgrounds and that the BNP had non-white members who are likely labouring under the apprehension that their fellow party members like and respect them and that, when they bang on about asylum seekers, they're talking about the other type of asylum seekers or people of colour, the bad kind, not good upstanding people like themselves. They are, of course, quite wrong and their co-members probably hate them as much as Polanski's anti-semitic colleagues hate him, but, like the Green anti-semites they are willing to use these useful idiots as a defence against accusations of racism. The very definition of tokenism.

No, up until recently they seemed reasonable and were concerned about climate change and the environment. God knows what's happened.

Were the Greens always this weird? When I was a teenager in the 00s, they were very much a fringe party, but I always assumed that was because the environment wasn't a priority for most. Now they appear to have moved away from environmentalism for the most part. They just seem to be a bunch of misogynistic anti-Semites now.

Excellent post, @Everlore
Thank you 👌

“From some muslims”.

Exactly.

To OPs post yes a muslim politician could make such a comment easily. A non-muslim could not. Same as with Polanski. A non-Jewish politician saying this would face a tsunami of criticism.

You can say things about your own group and get less pushback.

Twas ever thus.

(Although the claim that people are wary of criticising muslims is self-evident nonsense.)

Of course not # stupid argument

Exactly. I remember watching an interview with Hannah Pearl Davis, an American political commentator and self-proclaimed anti-feminist, where she was arguing against women's voting rights.
Would people argue that’s that not misogynist because she’s a woman herself?

The issue is that people like Polanski think they can protect themselves from anti-semitism by cosying up to the anti-semites and trying to prove to them that they are a 'good Jew', which, for the purposes of some elements of the Green Party and their ilk means not speaking out against blatant anti-semitism, just nodding and smiling politely when your 'mates' insist that Jews are responsible for all the world's ills and agreeing that all this 'so-called anti-semitism' is just 'legitimate criticism of Israel' and that Jews expressing fear for their safety are making a fuss over nothing. As we all know, making comments to British Jews about bringing back gas chambers and what a great man Hitler was are definitely 'legitimate criticism of Israel' and not absolutely vile pure racism.
When people like Polanski pal up with the anti-semites to prove they are not one of those 'evil genacidal Jews', they think they are making themselves safer. However, these self-hating Jews and apologists for anti-semitism should always remember that their new mates still hate them, because they are, in fact, rampant anti-semites. These racists are only tolerating Polanski as a useful idiot so they can say:
"See, I know that are party is rife with people making awful comments online that reek of Jew-hatred but we're not anti-semitic, honest. How could we be when we have an actual real-life Jew for a leader?"
Polanski, when you've done throwing your fellow Jews under the bus to placate your fellow party members, please don't forget to many of them you will always be a 'filthy Jew', no matter how useful a smoke-screen for their bigotry you are currently providing.
Polanski is by no means the first and will, sadly, not be the last, to think that sucking up to the bullies who want to harm them will protect them in some way.

But what's that got to do with Polanski being an obnoxious twat (to put it mildly)?

Yeah this. All they do is gas on about how Muslims are rapist scum. That's like their entire raison d'etre.

Calling for an end to the genocide being carried out by the state of Israel isn’t the as calling for the destruction of the state of Israel.

I think the thread title needs amending, not Polanski, more accurately “the tit whisperer”. Spot on.