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It couldn't be coming from stranger people. The Mail loves to talk about Remoaners; so does the Sun, the Express, the Telegraph, all media bastions of a right-wing politics that has for decades consisted almost entirely of one long whinge against the modern world. The same Daily Mail front page that bore the lurid "Damn the unpatriotic Bremoaners" banner was mostly devoted to an extended grumble about HS2. The whine has been echoing around the fringes of this country for a very long time: things aren't how they used to be, there's no respect any more, everything's expensive, they're trying to turn Christmas into Winterval, there are Muslims and gays and cyclists and any number of incomprehensible tribes edging their way to my doorstep. Things aren't exactly as I want them to be, and I hate it. What were all the months of complaining about banana-straightening Eurocrats before the referendum if not moaning? If moaning means a refusal to accept the decision, any decision, is anyone innocent but the dead?That people are sometimes guilty of hypocrisy, that they'll condemn behaviour in others that they engage in themselves, isn't exactly an earth-shattering revelation. But it's worth thinking about the semiosis of this whole process, the way that the signifier "moaning" and its shadowy twin "reasonable concerns" orbit obscurely around one another, dragging concepts and struggles into their orbits. People have reasonable concerns about the Islamisation of Europe or gangs of drug-crazed teenagers murdering their families, fantasies of things that aren't really happening; they moan about the nakedly fascist rhetoric percolating through all the layers of power into popular consciousness, as it drips in miserable globs all around us. To accuse someone of moaning about something requires a shared understanding that the object actually exists; the moaners are the ones who are uncomfortably correct.What were all the months of complaining about banana-straightening Eurocrats before the referendum if not moaning?
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