Counter Factual

Lies, damned lies and politics; it’s a brutal world out there right now... in people’s minds. The power of the narrative is not only demonstrable, but alarming... literally. And there is no requirement that any of the information received by supposed ‘high information’ voters has more than a passing acquaintance with fact. Old footage is being recycled and passed off as new; a short video from the Venezuelan mass protests was recently doing the rounds posing as an anti-Trump rally and was swallowed whole, despite the national flags, distinctly South American architecture and Spanish background chatter. And old photos of physical injuries are doing duty as reportage from the front lines, passed off as evidence of police brutality.

Twas ever thus. The left is telling itself that same old story; go on grandma, tell us again how you met granddad in the war. The folk tales and battle scars and anecdotes from the trenches are important in maintaining the illusion of unity. What is most important is supporting what they insist is the truth; that all aggression is from the right and all the healing from the left. They use the phrase ‘post-truth’ politics a lot, as if the notion of irony had been struck from their collective consciousness. If nothing else the rioting classes love a good slogan and like long words from indelicate mouths an illusion of intellect props up their bluster.

Thousands of distraught, fragile young things are imagining the horrors to come, denouncing them and self-harming like Billy-o. And people like the increasingly unhinged Michael Moore: urges insurrection from his bedroom, I mean Facebook page. (It's hard to remember that Michael Moore is actually a full-grown adult at times) Despite it being proven untrue long ago, the image of lemmings hurling themselves into the abyss is still the one which comes to mind; a fictional natural history illustrating a metaphorical suicide. Even a number of well-known UK rabble rousers are triggered to go postal on Trump, regardless of what he eventually proposes to do. Could it be they are basing their politics on the fact they just don’t like him?

On the other side of the battlefield, the rest of us – there is no ‘right-wing’ remember – are quietly getting on with business. Going to work, paying our taxes and accepting that our individual destinies are ours to command. And while we may look risibly down on the polemicists of the imaginary new order and cast a clout whenever it seems appropriate (which is mostly when it will be funniest) our regard for the mobs is more one of indulgent pity than the hate they tell each other we harbour.

Truth? If they want the truth about post-fact politics they could try looking again at that footage from Venezuela. They could ask the Cubans who have been fleeing their country in a steady stream ever since Castro took power. Ask the East Europeans who, having freed themselves from the Soviets, are currently horrified at what Merkel and her ideology driven maniacs are doing to the west they fought so hard to join. And the next time they sign on the dole they might want to ask where that money actually comes from.

Simple!

There is no other story to go with for today's blog than the lefty laff-fest that has been #nondomnishambles. What goes around comes around to bite you on the arse; thus found out Ed Balls when he was backed into a corner and had to explain how he now supported a policy move he opposed only back in January. The proposal was, of course, that of ending the non-domicile tax status of up to 120,000 people which between them pay the equivalent, by some estimates, of 10 million low paid workers. As a class-envy soundbite it has traction – soak the rich. But as sound economics the experts are agreed that they can’t agree.

What started out as a bold new policy announcement turned quickly into a shambolic reversal of a previous position, which became, under scrutiny, a plan instead to ‘look into’ changing a situation which Labour in power appeared to welcome, if the doubling of the numbers of non-doms in their time is anything to go by. The measure will either bring huge tax windfalls or it may cost the country money, but either way it will have no effect whatsoever on approximately 99.8% of the population over which Labour wish to exercise ‘leadership’. Are you following?

But all that detail hardly matters because few of us really understand any of the big economic arguments to any great degree of complexity, yet the left forever see conspiracy where none exists, or where it simply doesn’t matter. The very rich will be very rich until we try to rob them blind… at which point they will still be very rich, but just not over here. Keep. It. Simple… Stupid. Instead of imagining convoluted plots to grind poor people into the dirt – to what end, you ought to ask? – all you have to do is accept mankind’s venal, opportunistic, materialistic urges and all becomes crystal clear; people want to keep what they’ve got and really don’t want to give it away without a struggle.

If the non-doms are here it is because we have made it an attractive position for them to be so. Of course if Labour and the Greens and the SNP and Uncle Tom Marx and all get their way, the problems they see embodied in the existence of the rich will disappear along with their money as soon as those parties manage to relegate us from the league of properly civilised countries. But they can’t think like that; just as in Junior Chess, you have to think a few moves ahead to be in with a chance.

But no, unable to follow a coherent train of thought to its eventual terminus and explain the failure of their policies in power, they have to imagine non-existent bogeymen waiting in the shadows to de-rail their carriages. They do the same when talking about people with whom they disagree - making it complicated and assigning all sorts of calculated malevolence to those with differing opinions. And to their followers this ridiculous rhetoric rings true because how else could they be poor and uneducated and unhealthy unless the nasty, grasping, plotting forces of evil were ranged in solidarity against them?

What then, do we sentient free-acting agents think in turn of the lefties and their complicated interpretations of our devious and twisted, world-dominating motives? Well, for one thing, we don’t suppose to know their minds as they believe they know ours, in much the way we don’t really need to know what the cat is thinking. They are there, they’re a bit annoying at times, but when it comes down to it you can only judge them by their actions. They’re just not all that bright, are they?