Through the Looking Glass

Another weekend has passed and Jeremy Corbyn has been whipping his crowd into a froth of fevered excitement at the enticing prospect of victory at the general election in June. Here in social media land the wilfully indoctrinated are positively salivating as John McDonnell repeats his intention – I use the word loosely, as he will never be in a position to enact a single one of his madcap Marxist policies – of taxing all those he deems ‘the rich’. At the moment the bar appears to be set at just a tad above an MP’s salary.

Arthur Laffer famous curve and its effect was demonstrated in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan cut taxes and tax revenues rose from a little over $500 billion to around $900 billion during his time in office. Of course this may have just been a coincidence... and the collapse of the Venezuelan economy under Hugo Chavez’s socialist regime night also be a coincidence. Who knows? Nothing is ever as simple, as cut and dried as all that but Laffer’s contention that the more a thing is taxed, the less incentive there is to produce it, satisfies Occam’s test nicely.

Tax wealth creation and you will get tax avoidance. Crack down on tax avoidance and you will get tax evasion. Get tough on that and people will either settle for less or move their money elsewhere. Either way the tax take goes down and now you have to set the ‘rich bar’ lower, at which point you start punitively taxing those you promised not to. Before long anybody actually earning their own money becomes one of ‘the rich’ working to fund the spiralling costs of a voracious social welfare system. It is the self-defeating politics of envy and it has never, ever worked.

And yet, there they are, the Corbynistas, sloganizing their way to culthood and utterly impervious to logic and reason. Especially scathing when attacking all things Tory, these infantilised children of Marx will believe anything which panders to their delusion that ‘real socialism’ hasn’t been tried yet and is the only thing that can save the human race. The Moonies, The Branch Davidians, the Children of God, Heaven’s Gate and many others have successfully managed to convince large numbers of people that obviously wacko ideas are grounded in their alternate reality. There is a reason for all this and as usual, it’s not unusual...

Alternative? Alternative reality, more like...

Listening to last night’s The Digital Human, presented by Aleks Krotoski, I learned of The MandelaEffect, a condition in which a large number of people share a memory, despite it being demonstrably false. Have a listen; it explains the quasi-religious nature of tribal politics pretty closely. Why would so many people believe something so different from the obvious truth? Why would so many people readily believe that the Tories are somehow cruel and inhuman? The fact is that human memory is malleable and we all have some experience of false memories – if you don’t you are very unusual, or else you have yet to accept it. So, you warriors for social justice, you Marxmen for the revolution, do you want to take the red pill now? 

It's Digital

I will never understand parents. For a start I can’t get my head around how they decide at which point in their own development they feel they are ready to bring life, unbidden, into a world filled with dangers and disease and injustice and sheer chance. It seems clear to me that becoming a parent is entirely about fulfilling the selfish desire to have children and only after the birth does it have anything to do with the child itself. Even then, from my observations, this appears to be due to a warping of the brain chemistry of parents that separates them from reason and sets them on a path determined by events largely outside their influence.

I’m guessing a disease of much the same sort inhabits the fevered brains of leftists who appear to be incapable of seeing the world of humankind with any kind of clarity and instead prefer to promote unattainable dreams rather than do the job with the tools available. Take this piece of magic money tree thinking from Guardian contributor Poppy Noor who believes everybody should have the right to free housing.

Er, okay... You know nothing is ‘free’, right? Every single thing you have, including those children you desperately wanted but had no means to provide for, has to be paid for somehow. But humans, being the grasping apes that we are, will readily grab anything within reach and appropriate it for ourselves. Free workers’ housing would become free-riders’ housing the second somebody worked out how to qualify for accommodation and then rid themselves of the annoying quid pro quo of actually getting out of bed.

None of this matters, however, because leftists live in a hazy, ill-defined and angry little bubble of their own where only those who think alike are allowed free expression and everybody else is labelled – you guessed it – angry and hateful and xenoraceophobic..ist. Fortunately, that article is a clear spoof, entitled as it is ‘Utopian Thinking’. It ought to come with a warning: ‘Guardian Thinking’ (perhaps with a question mark to follow) Utopia means, of course ‘no such place’ which is perfect to describe the dream state of the left. Utopia? You betchia.

But wait, ‘angry’ leftists? Oh yes. Listening to Monday’s The Digital Human was very enlightening; well, it would have been if it wasn’t immediately apparent. It was all about how very, very angry social media is. Filled with rage against injustice and inequality – the twin refrains of the social justice warrior – SM exists for some merely as a means of waging war against those horrible, evil, grasping capitalists who already pay for everything and demanding they pay even more.

It was intriguing listening to what purported to be a balanced view about the state of humanity as an effete-sounding, feminised man explained how very cross he was and how online he became a mighty avenger and righter of wrongs. With his metrosexual vocal affectations it was enough to make you want to slap him in the face and tell him to get a proper job, bricklaying perhaps, if, of course, it made you angry enough to care.

But as one analyst after another came on to explain the phenomenon of online rage it sounded like nothing so much as a procession of angry but impotent people seeking psychological justification for their heightened sense of entitlement. A string of semi-coherent arguments for why they felt themselves to be in the right and how everybody else was Hitler, as they described ‘a whole new politics based around hatred and exclusion’.

Yes! We are all individuals!

And there it was. The shrinks came on to explain that in societies that dedicate themselves to the pursuit of equality, in parallel with the pursuit of affluence, the inevitable unequal outcomes drives some of them mad with envy and the resulting resentment boils over in those who are insufficiently grown up to set aside emotion and think clearly. Righteous anger directed at the world? Sounds like a socialist brat to me. So, next time you find yourself in a Twitter spat with a lefty just remember – it’s not their fault, it’s a genuine mental affliction. I blame the parents.