Long Division

In this post-truth, post-Clinton, Brexit-bound world the favourite bleat from those who imagine themselves disenfranchised (code for ‘we lost and it’s just not fair’) is that everything is divisive. As if prior to their politically correct ‘rights’ being challenged and shown not to be the majority stance everything was uniform and lovely and we all agreed that the only way was their way. I wonder if they ever took stock, as they nibbled their quinoa and tweaked their chakras and slapped each other on their worthy backs, of how easily assailable their social justice fortress was. Or did they imagine that the dirty clamouring peasants beyond the walls would just go away?

It’s odd though, don’t you think, that the champions of diversity and multiculturalism somehow expect all this differentness to result in an even set of sanitised, uniform, inoffensive views. To allow certain communities to go almost unchallenged as they set themselves apart is, in their view, peace and harmony, but to point out their separation from the rest of us is hateful and divisive. If hypocrisy had a sound it might well be an infant with a chocolate-smeared face repeatedly denying he had anything to do with the disappearance of tomorrow’s advent calendar treat.

You want to know what’s divisive? How about: You’re old, you don’t understand; you’re white, you must be excluded from the discussion; You’re a racist, sexist, disablist, misogynistic, white supremacist, cis-gender pig. I think those accusations tend to establish a bit of a gulf. Diane Abbott saying that white men like to play divide and rule; that’s pretty divisive. The Brexit debate is divisive? Of course it is; it’s divided between those who voted to leave and those who voted to stay; between those who embrace the potential opportunities it brings and those who would try and put the genie back in the bottle

Continually saying that such-and-such is divisive, as Owen Jones does, isn’t helpful. In fact as a statement of the bleeding obvious it is pointless and instead of allowing people to move on and explore common ground it gives permission to dig in your heels and refuse to budge. The same thing is happening over the pond; the exact-same snowflakes and vested interests who want to maintain an interventionist state that protects them from sometimes harsh reality versus those who want the state to butt out and let them rebuild industry to create wealth by making and selling things that people actually want to pay for.

But division can be good; for instance it can tell us things. Let’s divide the UK’s 2016 public spending of £761.9 billion by the supposed 65,260,038 population (as of yesterday). This tells us that the state costs £11,675 per head of population. When we divide that cost by the number of those in work – around 30.1 million - we get an annual cost of £25,312 per head. And when we factor in that 44% of those in work pay no income tax at all that rises to around £45,000 for those who do. Where is it all coming from?

I don’t know how much a diversity consultant gets paid although I do have an idea of how much one is worth. And I’m just guessing but I think I’d be on fairly solid ground if I suggested that those out on the streets, screaming and shouting about how unfair everything is, are more likely to come from the no-tax end of the work spectrum than the other. Rather than repeating that this is divisive, it might be more helpful to examine whether you are on the side that is helping or the side that is making it worse. Next time you get really exercised about fairness and division, do the maths.

Fake Off!

Emboldened by the Brexit vote the closeted bigots are taking to the streets and assaulting fragile people because of their colour, their religion or their political allegiance. Or are they? The reporting of ‘hate crimes’ may be at an all-time hysterical high but given that a hate crime is classified as such by those who report it, does the reporting match reality in any way. Also, in the wake of the Trump victory people are taking to social media to report in unconvincing terms, incidents that ‘literally’ never happened. But then, that’s social media for you.

And then there’s this: According to the yesterday’s newspapers, the impression was given that a leaked cabinet memo decried the government’s unpreparedness for Brexit, stating as if a fact, that another thirty thousand civil servants would need to be recruited just to deal with the admin of leaving the EU. “There you go!” cried the Remainers, “Where’s that £350-million a week for the NHS now, huh?” But hold your horses there, boys and girls; the ‘leaked cabinet memo’ turns out to have been written and speculatively punted by Deloitte and is little more than conjecture.

This may well be explained away as a simple misunderstanding but wait a minute. Nothing gets into the public domain unless it is put there. Yet this was no whistle-blower appalled at impending totalitarian legislation; this was no insider-opposition to a company poisoning the water. Rather it was cynical anti-Brexit mischief, created by exactly the sort of organisation that the public who voted ‘out’ distrust the most; big money, the alchemy by which a few words in a few ears makes $billions for people who already have $billions. The very sort of people who are seen as the establishment’s string-pullers.

We are, it is reported widely, in the era of fake news. Prank sites have been around for years. And pre-internet there were Private Eye and many others who feasted on parody, poked fun at the high and mighty and generally enjoyed a good old belly laugh at the government’s expense. But with the advent of the Internet it is getting harder every day to separate fact from fiction. Hence all the ‘I was attacked by Nazis’ stories being touted as evidence of sinister moves by one side and being ridiculed by the other. A common trope of our times is that everything is ‘divisive’; Brexit, Trump, Labour, Tory, climate change. Of course it is; if opinion wasn’t divided it would be whole and unwholesome – we’d be in N.Korea.

This is absolutely true!

But it turns out that all the fuss is over nothing; the proliferation of fake news sites is click-bait for advertising revenue. Like all such phenomena it will either stand the test of time and be recognised for what it is, or it will eventually fail to amuse and fall out of favour. In the meantime, it is far more informative to look at who is spreading the news and why; without provenance it would be wise to treat every supposed news item as fiction and its promulgators as peddlers of partisan lie. Or maybe, just maybe, the reporting of fake news sites is, itself, fake news. You decide...

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.

Arise!

The rise of the right, they’re saying and when they say it they believe and expect you to believe they mean Hitler, who was of course a big state socialist; the clue was in the name that became Nazi - National Socialist German Workers' Party – and yes, they were proper socialists. They may have fought against the Russian Communists, courted populist nationalism and rejected Marxism, but look at what they represented: Anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist, government control of everything and the subordination of individual rights for the good of the state. Oh and the anti-Semitism to which the left-wing still gives succour today.

Yes, there was the racial purity obsession, which probably explains why today’s leftist ideologues put miscegenation ahead of almost everything, but when was going from one extreme to the other the only conceivable option? Of course, Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ wasn’t the middle road along which we could all prosper and get along but simply a beard for personal ambition and the dismantling of Britishness... which was no third way at all. Nope, the Nazis were lefties, just Aryan ones. It’s much like religion; all those groups fighting each other through millennia over the right to define worship of their imaginary friend as superior to all other creeds, yet all believing the same illogical nonsense.

The BNP? Socialists. EDL? A football firm with a hard-on for muslims but no discernible political agenda and absolutely tiny in comparison with the numbers of troublemakers who regularly defile national solemnity over Armistice Day. The bloke who killed Jo Cox? Singular; A. Bloke. Try as you might you just can’t point to a violent, organised, political right-wing as such, because there isn’t one. The opposite of statism isn’t fascism, it’s anarchy and as we know anarchists don’t play well with others. This leaves us with, at one end, extreme and brutal communism and at the other extreme and brutal dictatorships, of which there are precisely none in the developed world.

The right wing, which for outrage purposes is merely anybody who disagrees with the left wing’s authoritative, controlling stance is ‘rising’ not as an ideology in itself, but as a necessity, after years and years and years of self-righteous (pun intended) lefties shitting over everybody’s freedoms. The right wing of their imagination comprises legions of jack-booted, ill-educated lynch mobs, singling out ‘the other’ for harassment when in fact the jack boot has always been the preferred footwear of those who would arrest you for using banned words, or expressing opinion which has been decreed verboten.

The more stridently they scream about rights the more contradictory they become; rights for others, but not for you. The more hysterically they make their demands and the more violent their protests become the more ordinary, non-politically active people feel uneasy about the motives of the mobs in their streets and the commentators on their screens. The more ‘they’ try to represent themselves as the majority and claim they are the public mood, the more those who quietly get on with their lives are inclined to refute their representation... and quietly exercise their rights by voting.

When the left get organised...

The left simply cannot accept that anything is their fault. After all, they have swallowed wholesale the holy scriptures which tell them that they are good and true and the fabled Nazis – who they hate with every fibre of their being – are the hatemongers. When you stand in the middle of a crowd, all chanting the same slogans, it must be almost impossible not to believe it. Wouldn’t you drink the Kool Aid too? Jeremy Corbyn says it is all the fault of the mythical right; that the Trump victory is a wakeup call to the world. In a way he’s right, but his timing is out. The election outcome isn’t the call, it is the response. 

Trumping

Continuing the week's Trumpestuous theme the title of this post says it all. Obama met Trump yesterday and you can just imagine the frost in the room as icicles formed on the bust of Martin Luther King. I expected a peremptory handshake and then down to brisk business but the session lasted over an hour and that is plenty of time to air a few honest opinions. Boy, oh boy wouldn't you have wanted to be a fly on that particular wall? Well, I have news. Thanks to a leaked transcript of a covert recording I can reveal at least a part of that momentous liaison.

After the pleasantries which were decidedly formal and after the quick tour of the ‘facilities’ the two sat down together and hammered out an agreement that the transition will be business-like, polite and courteous. They concurred that following a somewhat tempestuous relationship it was time to bury the hatchet for the good of the nation and yada, yada, yada... that’s the guff you got on the news. What hasn’t been reported, until now, is what they really talked about for the rest of the time. Well, it all began harmlessly enough.

After a brief confusion when Obama whispered something to Trump which sounded like “I can still have you killed” but was hastily repeated as “I can see you have skills” the talk was steered away from the political to the personal as each man recounted anecdotes from the road that had led them to this place. “When I was born...” began Barack “In Hawaii, right?” interrupted Donald. “Uh, yeah, whatever,” said Barack and continued “...we were pretty poor. My mom brought me up to work hard and she told me, 'Son, you can be whoever you want to be'. I set my sights on getting to the top and look, here I am.”

Donald graciously let him finish that sentence but with unseemly haste, not pausing to digest the story, waded straight in with, “Well see, I was bored one afternoon and I wondered what I should be great at next. Then I saw you on TV and decided, there and then, I’ll do that; I can do better than that.” Barack nodded ruefully as Donald carried on “So, I made a few calls and next thing you know I’m on the campaign trail and let me tell you, the people loved me and now, here I am. It ain’t that hard.”

“I tell you what was hard, Donald, growing up in poverty” Obama continued. “After my mom remarried we moved to Indonesia and lived for a while in a tiny shack in Jakarta. There was no running water and we had to share a toilet with three other families.” Trump looked on with an expression party pity, part condescension. “I grew up owning New York City” he boasted, “I could take my pick of where I wanted to live. The Trumps are the embodiment of the American dream.”

Preparations are under way for the inauguration parade

“I didn’t do so bad, though, for a poor black kid” replied Obama, “Look at all this.” He spread his arms to indicate the splendour of the White House. Trump wasn’t impressed. “You call this grand?” he asked, “This is nothing. Why I once had this country estate and I tell you, it used to take me over an hour to drive from the gate to the main house!” Barack Obama looked ruefully over at Donald Trump, momentarily lost for words at his bombastic attitude. It was clear that whatever he said would be trumped by the new President-elect. He just shook his head, sighed and nodded. “I once had a car like that...”