Since the Cesspool is off limits - self imposed, I hasten to add - to me for my own blogging purposes for a while, I have been loitering with intent in a shifty, guilty way, over at the Kid's recently.

Ah, the vigour of the youthful mind is a wonderful thing. When the Kid drew attention to the bonkers end of the Grauniad's forum, I made a comment to the effect that he should be wary of smearing a place on the strength of it's barmy users, lest someone should do the same to him. And, seeing as the likes of WJ Philips and Guessedworker are among his regular contributors, this is very real danger. The Kid replied that it only happened to him once, courtesy of one J Durkin. I must say I am impressed at the boy's diligence and memory. He will go far.

Also in the exchange was this:

Middleagedcurmudgeon writes: "I keep going back to have another guilty peek when I could be posting or better still, working."

This is the key sentence-- a confession. The first stage in encountering unfamiliar ideas is guilty fascination; next comes spluttering, caricatural dismissal (see above); then recidivist entertaining of the heresies as fresh evidence seems to support them; and finally (usually suprisingly rapidly) outright acceptance, accompanied by a face-saving "but I believe a moderate, rational, polite version of it."

You can see this at work at a higher intellectual level in the astonishingly speedy collapse of the regnant ideology of race relations among self-styled progressive opinion formers such as Furedi, Selbourne, Goodhart and Melanie Phillips. "I'm not a racist, but..." The "but" gets bigger and bigger.

posted by someone anonymously. My money is on Guessedworker, partly because it bears his imprint of pomposity and cod intellectualism and partly because he is the only person I have ever come across who might use the word regnant.

I must say, though, I am keeping a weather eye on my attitudes from hereon in, just in case I find myself lurching into the murkier areas of racist thought. I mean, as he so rightly says, these are unfamiliar ideas he is talking about, you never know how they are going to affect you. I've only been properly aware of them of them for around thirty five years, which in the scheme of things is no time at all.

I think though, that for the moment I am safe, although a seismic shift in my thinking may be underway. I've always been a bit of a wimpy, pacific sort of guy, but I'm beginning to think there are certain Caucasians in bloggo bloggo land who might benefit from a good kicking.