Legitimate concern trolls

We hear a lot about the "legitimate concerns" of "ordinary people" about immigration.  But we hear very little about how those concerns have been deliberately inflamed by an elite clique of well-funded, well-connected propagandists, close to the heart of government.

Here's a brief portrait of the British establishment's favourite concern trolls from the Ducksoap blog:

“We [the Migration Watch pressure group] are an independent, non political body which is concerned about the present scale of immigration into the UK.”

Civil servant Andrew Green created Migration Watch as a tool to be used by governments to help the latter justify anti-immigrant policy. Thus, the words “independent” and “non political” in the think-tank’s declaration are vital to ensure the government can claim, falsely, to be advised by a separate unbiased entity. Green’s assistance to successive governments’ anti-immigration policies was rewarded with a peerage in 2014.

Migration Watch focuses on blaming immigration for all of Britain’s economic woes and consequential issues with the NHS, housing, employment etc. It is standard misdirection, accompanied by comical abuse of statistics.

It is, by now, a bit late to point out that scapegoating minorities for political advantage never ends well, but it's only fair that professional migrant-bashers like Andrew Green at least take their share of the blame for the outbreak of xenophobic self-harm currently paralysing the UK.

Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more! Netflix does murder sleep”

"At Netflix, we are competing for our customers' time, so our competitors include Snapchat, YouTube, sleep, etc."

Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, as quoted in this six minute talk on the attention economy:


Fantastic though the quote is, I don't think Netflix is the worst offender here. After all, it's an entertainment company, so it's an open secret that its products only exist to pleasurably divert your attention.

It's far worse to have your attention stolen by relentless advertisers and marketers yammering ceaselessly, and far less entertainingly, for ever bigger slices of your bandwidth. Worse still are the infotainment and social media industries, which dangle the promise of a meaningful connection with the significant humans in your life, or an informed take on what's happening in the world in general, but too often fill the headspace that should be available for worthwhile interaction and understanding with a distorted, abbreviated, decontextualised blizzard of trivia and sensation.

You can forewarn and forearm yourself against the siren voices of distraction but, as the Odyssey warned, you should take extreme precautions if you want to play with temptation without being lured onto the rocks.

This guy won't pay to hear the Sirens. You won't believe what happens next!

Noblesse oblige

How I miss the days when our rapacious, out-of-touch elite still had a modicum of class and decorum:

At Mrs. Rivett's inquest I wore a hat because of my rank as a Peeress of the Realm and I wore the same outfit on each of the four days it lasted as it is vulgar to use a tragic and grave matter such as an inquest as an opportunity to display one's wardrobe.

From the web site of Lady Lucan and/or a forthcoming series entitled "Things Melania Trump would be least likely to say."

Although, to be fair, at least Melania's short-fingered vulgarian of a husband hasn't actually killed any of his domestic staff, at least to my knowledge.



Via

We velcro meerkats to your eyeballs

Is the tongue-in-cheek brand awareness campaign lurking under the hashtag dontsayvelcro so annoyingly patronising that it can be written off as a failure?

Or is the annoyance a feature, not a bug, deliberately engineered to fix the brand in the public's awareness by being as unignorably irritating as those wretched advertising meerkats?

I'd like to believe that the numpties who came up with this rubbish have failed miserably, but deep in my cynical heart I think they've probably just suceeded in trolling us for fun and profit. And I guess my failure to ignore them just illustrated how it works.

King George "disappointed"; Independence Day cancelled

It's not true to say that Americans don't know any history, or understand irony. But if you listen to some of the statements coming out of the US State Department, you can see how people might get that impression.

Apparently, officials in the USA have pronounced themselves "disappointed" that some people in Iraqi Kurdistan just voted for independence, without considering how mad that sounds coming from Americans.

Er, guys, can you imagine how George Washington would have reacted to a headline like this?

Britain "deeply disappointed" by American Colonies' independence vote

Do you really think that would have changed his mind? Just asking.

Free speech - a clarification

The American alt-right recently cancelled an advertised "Free Speech Week" event. This was supposed to feature Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter and Steve Bannon explaining to students how an alleged politically correct fear of causing offence was stifling free expression.

You might have dismissed this as yet more self-serving nonsense from a bunch of abusive trolls, but it quickly turned out that, liked a stopped clock, even this bunch can be right twice a day.

Freedom of expression is under threat, in almost precisely the way they'd been warning us about. A forthright group of athletes decided to express their point of view by disrupting a commonly-accepted piece of etiquette.

This piece of radical free expression triggered America's Snowflake-In-Chief who, instead of dealing with the rough and tumble of robust debate and freedom of opinion, just whined that somebody really ought to sack the horrible people who'd upset him so.

So apparently we do need this failed free speech event to be revived and re-scheduled. But not at a university, where most students should already be quite capable of analysing and debating ideas on their merits.

No, the venue that really needs a long and detailed lecture on the merits of free expression and the marketplace of ideas is that fragile orange bubble of safe space currently floating back and forth between 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Mar-a-Lago, Florida.

Breaking: pound shop Oswald Mosley to undergo trial by TV (licence)

"Nigel Farage has threatened to stop paying his licence fee unless the BBC apologises for reporting that he had "blood on his hands" over the death of a Polish man in the wake of the EU referendum."

If you think that a broadcaster has seriously defamed you, I think the correct response is "see you in court", not "I'm probably thinking about not paying for my TV licence."

Come on, Nige, I'm sure you and your rich mates can have a whip round and get you lawyered up. Defend your reputation properly, man. Or are you scared you might lose?

Ask another silly question

They're coming thick and fast now. After "Is it time to place our future in Boris's hands and prepare for new leadership?" (no, obviously), here's another question with an even more obvious answer.

Who should you trust to give an accurate assessment of how much the United Kingdom pays the European Union - the head of the UK Statistics Authority, or Michael Gove, a man who believes that it's possible for all schools to be above average?

Please tell me that there's nobody left who still needs help working out the correct answer.

Ask a silly question...

"Is it time to place our future in Boris's hands and prepare for new leadership?"

If you still believe in a thoroughly debunked claim that was too dodgy even for The Wide Boy of Brexit himself, that might be a "yes."

For everybody else, see Betteridge's Law.

The smoking gun

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has documented the deaths of 331,765 persons on the Syrian territory since the start of the Syrian revolution on the 15th of March 2011 until the 15th of July 2017...

In 2016, the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) reported that terrorism had killed 29,376 people around the world in the previous year.

The 2017 Global Burden of Disease study (GBD) says that seven million deaths were caused by tobacco use last year. 

Seven. Million.

What lurks beneath the smirk

It's easy to criticise a public figure for having a "gaffe" or a "car crash interview." But most of us, if we're being honest, couldn't have done much better.

A lot what we think of as success is performative, especially in these days of self-branding. The skill of coming across as warm, persuasive, interesting, confident and fluent may not always be a reliable indicator of being well-briefed, of having good ideas, or of being competent, but it's still a skill, and one that few of us have reliably mastered. I know in my heart of hearts that most public figures performing below par in a "car crash interview" are probably doing about as well as I'd do on a good day. It's easy to mock, especially if you disagree with the person in question, but generating a convincing public persona is hard.

The gaffes you can enjoy guilt-free are the ones when a public figure blurts something damning that's consistent with both the character they usually present and what they actually do.

Which brings us to George Osborne who, apparently, won't rest until Theresa May is “chopped up in bags in my freezer” and his rival for Arrogant Smug-Faced Git of the Century, Martin Shkreli, who's been on Facebook, offering $5,000 for a strand of Hillary Clinton's hair for reasons I'd rather not know about.

So their fantasies and obsessions are as toxic as the things we already know they've done to people less powerful than themselves, and the way they bear themselves in public. On one level, there's no mystery here. Hiding beneath the arrogant persona of a weirdly callous, self-satisfied bastard is a weirdly callous self-satisfied bastard. No hidden depths, just surface, like the guy in American Psycho.

What does puzzle me, in these days when image is king, is how a person can get so far in life while still rocking the crazed stalker/psycho killer look. Given the way we speak of an unbalanced aristocrat as "eccentric" and a mentally ill person on a bus as a "loony", I suspect that the halo effect of already possessing a large stash of cash plays a role.

Anyway, on to my musical interlude of the day. Bet you can't listen to this without picturing George Osborne adopting that strangely David Byrne-like power pose:

Sweet as a nut

"Poundland Nutters: Mental health row over 'offensive' sweets"

Offensive Poundland nutters? Never mind mental health rows, Ukip should sue them for copyright infringement. 

A firm, but fair, refugee policy

This, from Hayley Dixon in the Telegraph, is so ripe with (unintentional?) irony it's fit to burst:

British holidaymakers say that they have been abandoned starving on a hurricane-hit island as evacuation planes leave half empty because they have no permission to take "refugees" from the UK.

Anger is growing over the "disgraceful" Government response to the disaster as families of those on one of the worst hit islands say there has been no information and no help despite the growing lawlessness and the fact they are running out of their last scraps of food and water. 

The father of one of the British refugees complained that:

"They are just trying to survive. They are being told to go to the airport each day but the Dutch and the French are just looking after their own, if you have got the wrong passport then you don't fly. "

I'd have thought that a Brit, of all people, would have understood that it is the right and duty of every sovereign nation to create a hostile environment for people who end up in the wrong place with the wrong passport. British refugees should count themselves lucky that the French equivalent of Katie Hopkins hasn't suggested machine-gunning stranded Brits yet.

And if you still think refugee British holiday makers have it bad, spare a thought for the residents of British territories in the Caribbean. Facing a hungry, uncertain future in the shattered wreckage of their homes and communities, the British government has decided to send them Boris Johnson to make their misery complete. Now that's what I call a hostile environment.

The Dutch are stopping accidents with this one weird trick

If you're a car driver, situational awareness shouldn't end when you turn off the ignition key. Between 2011 and 2015, carelessly-opened car doors killed eight people and reportedly injured 3,108, according to UK government figures. Fortunately, you can be part of the solution, if you just do this:

...[Cycling UK is] urging ministers to have the "Dutch reach" taught in driving tests. This manoeuvre involves the driver or passenger on the right-hand side of the car opening the door with the left hand - forcing them to turn and see if anyone's approaching.

It's a mandatory part of Dutch driving tests. 

It's simple, it works, and I can't imagine why anyone would object to making this tiny modification to their car door-opening behaviour.

Of course, there's bound to be some aggrieved motorist out there who'll go off on some mad rant about how he's* used his other hand all his life without dooring a cyclist, how it's always cyclists who are a menace to all law-abiding road users and how we wouldn't need this latest example of health and safety gone mad if all other road users except him weren't idiots.

It shouldn't need pointing out that this sort of whingeing is nonsense, but it probably does. Part of the problem is the tribal "us and them" mentality which unites some motorists in their hatred of cyclists (and vice versa). The thing is, you can always find individual examples of somebody else on the road behaving badly, including cyclists - the recent case of the wanton and furious cycle killer, Charlie Alliston, comes to mind.

The Alliston case, in turn, generated this headline in Cycling Weekly - "The media coverage of the Charlie Alliston case should be disturbing for cyclists everywhere", as if criticism of one person's selfish irresponsibility needs to be toned down, lest it reflect badly on the rest of the cycling tribe.

The thing is, like a lot of people, I'm sometimes a pedestrian, sometimes a motorist, sometimes a cyclist, sometimes a public transport user. I am large, I contain multitudes. None of these identities is a problem if I behave with care and consideration. Any of them might be if I don't.

The differences between the various forms of transport shouldn't be tribal. The only distinction which matters is an ascending hierarchy of responsibility, related to how much damage your chosen form of transport could do. An individual cyclist might be as careless as an individual motorist, but it seems beyond obvious to me that the motorist's carelessness is a bigger problem, because you can do more damage with a motor vehicle - there's a reason why there have been several terrorists attacks involving motor vehicles being deliberately driven into crowds, but none involving disaffected misfits deliberately trying to create mass carnage with a push bike.




*It might be a she, but I'll bet folding money that it will be a he.

The stork has landed

Well, Nigel Farage’s new best friend has turned out to be a real charmer, hasn't she?

Just in case you missed it, Beatrix von Storch, the MEP from the German far-right AfD party who invited Nigel Farage to address the party faithful at the Spandau Citadel, got into a spot of bother last year. She reportedly said that police should be allowed to shoot women and children trying to enter Germany illegally.

It seems that her comments were reported correctly, since she subsequently issued a weird, impersonal retraction, saying “the use of firearms against children is not permitted”, which she immediately qualified by adding “women are a different matter”.

"The use of weapons against them can therefore be permitted within the narrow legal framework."

Well, I'm glad she managed to skilfully defuse that potential controversy with a hilarious Adolf Eichmann impression.

Her Trumpian clarification was apparently good enough to satisfy the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD) group, which was jointly led by Nigel Farage. An EFDD source disingenuously claimed that “Beatrix has agreed to uphold the charter of the group, publicly apologized and issued a statement that neither AfD nor herself want to shoot people at the border", when what she'd actually said was that the police weren't technically allowed to open fire on women AND children - just the women.

There's your banality of evil, right there.

Inspirational spiritual quote of the day

"My spiritual side took over and I kicked her in the face.”

Abdullah Cakiroglu, explaining how the sight of a 23-year-old nurse wearing shorts on a bus left him with no alternative but to attack her.

Fortunately,  the assault was captured on CCTV,  so Mr Cakiroglu will be able to continue his exploration of the ineffable during a spiritual retreat of three years and ten months, spent in the contemplative atmosphere of a Turkish prison cell.

"Exceptional performance" Leviticus-style

I partly agree with universities minister Jo Johnson that there's something deeply wrong with a higher education system that combines massive payouts for superstar vice-Chancellors with massive lifetime debts for students. But, under current circumstances, I can't help thinking that the Jo Johnson's chosen metric for assessing a vice-Chancellor's worth is a bit topsy-turvy. When you turn his value metric upside down, by slightly re-writing this Telegraph article, the comparison seems fairer:

The Government faces fines if it fails to justify paying the Prime Minister more than university vice-Chancellors

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) will unveil plans today that will see the Government forced to demonstrate that a prime ministerial salary of over £150,000 represents value for money.

The announcement comes amid growing concern about the largesse of Parliament where a lame-duck Prime Minister now enjoys substantial remuneration with a grace and favour London home, travel perks and a gold plated pension.

In a speech at Westminster, IPSA Chair, Professor Sir Ian Kennedy, will say that he aims to curb the “spiralling" growth of prime ministerial pay packets and that “exceptional pay can only be justified by exceptional performance.”

This means that the Prime Minister will have to demonstrate that she is providing the UK with a high quality of leadership and a plausible chance of good economic prospects, as opposed to merely holding office in order to divert blame for a series of catastrophic errors away from her ambitious colleagues, who are currently preparing to sacrifice her just as soon as she has served her purpose as collective blame-magnet.

Professor Kennedy is currently working on an updated pay scale for Powerless Sacrificial Victim In-Chief, based on the closest industry equivalent, a goat. This would equate to a prime ministerial allowance of around one to two kilos of hay per day, minus whatever she might forage in fields of wheat. 

There, fixed it for you, Jo.

The six children of Pope Jacob the First

The MP [Jacob Rees-Mogg] joked that as a Catholic male he is eligible to become Pope, and that if the holy ghost called upon him to do so "I will do my duty".

I guess they'll need to squeeze a few extra beds into the Papal Apartments to accommodate Jacob's wife, Helena de Chair, his six children, Alfred Wulfric Leyson Pius, Thomas Wentworth Somerset Dunstan, Peter Theodore Alphege, Anselm Charles Fitzwilliam, Mary Anne Charlotte Emma and Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher, along with their long-suffering nanny, Veronica Crook.

Although The Birmingham Mail assumed that Jacob Rees-Mogg was joking, it's also plausible that the obsessively Eurosceptic Catholic knows as little of the actual rules and procedures governing the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church as he does of those pertaining to the European Union. Which would explain the holy mess his lot are making of this Brexit malarkey.

Mind you, there are precedents, of sorts. There are passages in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, as well as in the Epistle to the Corinthians which suggest that Saint Peter was married, and Pope Honorius IV, who died in April 1287, was the last pope to have been married (albeit before he entered Holy Orders). Several pontiffs, most notoriously Alexander VI, are known to have fathered offspring, some of them while in office, so maybe the Moggster's right to consider a position even more elevated than leader of the Conservative Party.

Treason and plot

It's twenty years since Princess Diana's car crash induced a section of the UK's public to let it all out in a well-publicised display of unrestrained public grief. This surprised a lot of people who thought that we were all far too restrained and stoical to behave like that.

Twenty years on, the Brexit car crash has triggered a similar emotional ketchup burst, with the crucial difference that what's now being unbottled isn't tears, but an incoherent howl of rage. This furious screed against "the EU side – and their treacherous Remoaner allies", by Yorkshire Post hack Bill Carmichael, is fairly typical.

Any idea of the UK as a place of calm emotional understatement has gone out of the window again, now that the newspapers, which once pronounced us united in collective sorrow, are hurling frothing accusations of treason around like confetti.

Treason is a serious charge, so should I start being worried?

Technically, probably not - I'm not currently planning to murder, conspire against, or declare war on, the monarch or her family, seduce Prince Phillip, the Duchess of Cornwall, or Princess Kate, "injure or alarm the sovereign", kill specific VIPs like "the chancellor" (of the exchequer?), or a high court judge.

It's a pretty solid defence in actual law, but I don't know if it would stand up in the revolutionary court where the Brexiteers are already busy pronouncing the judgement of history on the designated enemies of the people.

What I do know is that I'm technically on safer ground than those Sun readers who declared in a recent poll that that they don't want our fuddy-duddy royal heir Prince Charles to succeed to the throne and would like him to step aside for his media-friendly son Prince Will, with his charming wife and photogenic sprogs. The Treason Act 1702 specifically says that it's treason :

...if any person or persons ... shall endeavour to deprive or hinder any person who shall be the next in succession to the crown ... from succeeding after the decease of her Majesty (whom God long preserve) to the imperial crown of this realm and the dominions and territories thereunto belonging. 

Here's a simple propsal - instead of trying to shoot the messenger whenever their pet project seem to be running into trouble, why don't the Brexiteers turn their large-bore rage cannon against this peculiar succession narrative being propagated by the foreign-owned Murdoch press and their treacherous Wilhelmine allies? Just a thought.

Update
Just to drive the point home, this is where we end up when the idea of treason stops being a joke about the obscure offences the Queen might send you to the Tower of London for and starts being thrown about  as a serious accusation.

Five serving members of the British army have been arrested on suspicion of being members of the recently banned neo-Nazi group National Action...

... The slogan on its former website was: “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain,” which was the only statement given in court by [Jo] Cox’s murderer, Thomas Mair.

Nice company Bill Carmichael's keeping.

A degraded ecosystem

Tom Pride has written one of the best takedowns of one of the worst pieces of journalism we've seen so far this year.

This was a case where the mainstream press mangled the basic facts about a vulnerable child and the temporary foster parents who were looking after her into a inflammatory, sectarian fairy story as fake as anything the Breitbart propaganda organ's autofellator-in-chief could have made up.

Tom lists the ten most outrageous lies, along with the real facts of the case as we know them, and thinks that the journalists responsible have been so malicious and/or incompetent that they clearly deserve to be sacked.

I wouldn't be sorry to see the backs of the hacks in question, either, but I'm also sceptical about the idea that chronic misinformation from the press is a problem that can be solved by chucking out a few bad apples.

As far as I can see, the problem isn't just bad hacks beating proper journalists in a straight fight for possession of a level playing field. The problem is a news ecosystem where sensational lies can quickly bloom and flourish, crowding out the slower growth of conscientious, fact-checked journalism.

While sacking spectacularly bad journos might feel good in the short term, only a system that supports journalists in general will allow producers of good-quality information to flourish. And at the moment, it sounds ridiculously hard to flourish as a good journalist.

The horrible examples here* are from the USA, but they're quite consistent with what I've been reading about the state of UK journalism for years (ever since Flat Earth News).

A chronically insecure profession, which denies professionals the time and resources to do a good job is a bad place to be, if you're conscientious, curious and questioning.

It's probably a better place to be if you're an over-confident compulsive bullshitter, happy to obediently fill blank spaces with a generic infotainment product, mindlessly reflecting your employers' brand values, without unprofitably wasting too much the day checking out those messy, time-consuming and frequently off-message things called facts.

You can see how such an insecure, pressured environment might favour groupthink, corner-cutting and reflexive deference to unreasonable authority, while selecting against the slower processes of analytic thinking, fact-checking and questioning received opinion, which are the basis of what any reasonable person would call good journalism.

That's bad enough in itself, but the effect is amplified by the encroachment of an invasive species into the news ecosystem - the Greater Public Relations Weasel.

As Roy Greenslade, pointed out last year, the 64,000 people working as journalists in the UK are now outnumbered by the 84,000 people working in public relations. And we know that a lot of what journalists do isn't objective, factual reporting of what the journalists themselves think is important, but mere recycling of press releases and infomercials from a members of a larger, well-funded profession which has no claim to objectivity, or to any value more public-spirited than burnishing the image of its clients.

The effect is further amplified when the the lies made up by bad journalists, or mindlessly copy n' pasted from press releases are propagated by public service broadcasters. The BBC doesn't just do its own journalism in a vacuum, but reflects back the news agenda spawned in the incestouous hothouse of sloppy, journalism and public relations spin.

As an example, take Radio 4's flagship morning news programme, Today. On weekdays, it kicks off its broadcast at 6.00am sharp, with a rundown of its own headline stories (one, or more, of which will frequently have started life as a story from elsewhere in the mainstream press), followed by a weather report, then a round up of what the British newspapers have decided to put on their front pages that day.

In this way, poisonous nonsense like the "Christian child forced into Muslim foster care" scare headline, complete with sensational details about a crucifix being forcibly removed and the child being told to learn Arabic are laundered into the national discourse,  via the supposedly respectable, fact-based BBC ("We're only reporting what other people are saying").

Wake up to our unbiased national broadcaster and the day's newly-minted lies can be churning round your brain before you've gulped down your coffee and breakfast cereal.

Of course, people can try to refute provable untruths, but thanks to the backfire effect, this may only succeed in hammering home the original lies more firmly.

And there's an even more insidious feedback loop going on. The act of fact-checking bad journalism has created the idea that fake news comes from the mainstream media (which it sometimes does). So now,  notoriously shameless liars like Trump, Johnson and Farage can bellow "You're fake news!" in the face of any journalist who dares to hold them to account, or sneeringly dismiss easily verified facts as "project fear." It might sound ridiculous coming from people like that, but when they play on distrust of the mainstream media, the partisan, slipshod mainstream media really do bear some of the blame.

And the feedback loop gets loopier still. When more reasonable, non-fanatical people hear blustering Trumpist ninnies raging about how they're being unfairly misrepresented by the crooked, dishonest mainstream media, their natural reaction is to categorise anyone who points out media bias as a blithering loon who can safely be ignored for ever.

And if such media sceptics are ignored, the mainstream meda can continue to churn out the sort of inaccurate, vindictive rubbish that helped create the low-trust environment which spawned the whole Trumpist brand of post-truth politics in the first place...

It was just one story, about one little girl who's had a tough life, but the way it's been distorted and weaponised shines a light on a whole bunch of stuff that touches every one of us, from which voices get heard, and which are suppressed, or misrepresented, to the hollowing out of respected professions and their replacement by toxic bullshit jobs, to the awful politics that we get when mere facts can be drowned out by whoever has the loudest foghorn, to the question of who, ultimately, benefits from the seemingly exponential growth in mistrust, insecurity and chaos.

*via