{"id":345,"date":"2010-07-12T13:50:19","date_gmt":"2010-07-12T20:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/judipiggott.ca\/blog\/?p=345"},"modified":"2016-05-25T13:11:55","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T20:11:55","slug":"the-downside-of-victimhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/judipiggott.ca\/blog\/the-downside-of-victimhood\/","title":{"rendered":"The downside of victimhood"},"content":{"rendered":"

<<\/p>\n

div class=”zemanta-img” style=”margin: 1em; display: block;”><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

July 11, 2010<\/p>\n

Consider this\u00a0excerpt from an 1826 essay by <\/span>William Hazlitt<\/span><\/a> (quoted\u00a0by Sasha Abramsky in his article in The Chronicle of Higher Education,\u00a0July 11, 2010 – <\/span>Look Ahead in Anger: <\/span><\/em><\/a>Hyperbolic rhetoric threatens to swamp our politics).<\/em> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

It came across my reading pane as I am wrestling with the issues of funding cutbacks to the not-for-profit arts sector in B.C. and finding alternative and more productive responses……<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

It brings to mind a quote from William Hazlitt’s 1826 essay “<\/em>On the Pleasure of Hating<\/em><\/a>“: “The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others.” Cultures that self-identify as victims and come to see their defining historical references as a series of grievances have a tendency to mutate in ways that range from unpleasant to catastrophic*<\/sup><\/strong>…<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

*my emphasis – and I love that William Hazlitt was clearly also a visual artist as well as an essayist.<\/p>\n

\"Enhanced<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

< div class=”zemanta-img” style=”margin: 1em; display: block;”> July 11, 2010 Consider this\u00a0excerpt from an 1826 essay by William Hazlitt (quoted\u00a0by Sasha Abramsky in his article in The Chronicle of Higher Education,\u00a0July 11, 2010 – Look Ahead in Anger: Hyperbolic rhetoric threatens to swamp our politics). It came across my reading pane as I am wrestling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[65,64,63,62],"class_list":["post-345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","tag-history","tag-philosophy","tag-pleasure-of-hating","tag-william-hazlitt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/judipiggott.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/judipiggott.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/judipiggott.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judipiggott.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judipiggott.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/judipiggott.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1439,"href":"https:\/\/judipiggott.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions\/1439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/judipiggott.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judipiggott.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judipiggott.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}