Doctor Strangememe Or: How Oliver Learned To Stop Worrying And Love AI

We see lots of “You can use AI for that” boosterism coming from the corporate right, desperate to convince investors in this stuff that the money they’ve thrown at generative AI will pay huge dividends. So I was bemused to see one Oliver Markus Malloy, apparently a progressive Democrat bigging it up (link to his piece here).

His core argument is that reactionaries (MAGA, its global network of far right allies and weird techbros) use this stuff, so progressives also need to use this weapon or get destroyed when the right brings its AI gun to a political knife fight. It’s classic arms race thinking - just as the rival imperial powers threw steel and sweat into the pre-World War One dreadnought-building race, he argues that progressives should respond to their rivals' AI by throwing scraped content into producing bigger, badder memes than the enemy (he also makes another argument that content created by AI can be art, not just derivative "slop" but it's his thoughts on political comms that concern me most).

I’m sceptical about the “this is an arms race we must win” argument. OK, we’re agreed that the corporate right/far right alliance has an advantage when it comes flooding the zone with clickbaity content quickly and at scale. The argument goes that by not adopting the same techniques & tools, progressives are ceding the information space to their enemies.

I'm not convinced that progressives should mirror their opponents in this reactive way. I'm not arguing that the far right doesn't use this stuff, or that the sheer volume of content it allows them to pump out doesn't work. After all, "Quantity has a quality all its own" as Josef Vissarionovich probably never said.

But before we decide that "we need some of that", maybe we need to think about what lessons we can learn from the last time the right used IT and big data to make historic gains. In the run-up to the United Kingdom's vote on whether or not to leave the European Union and Trump's first battle for the White House, we saw how bad actors like Cambridge Analytica were able to use big data to flood social media with vast quantities of targeted disinfomation and rage bait. 

The likes of Facebook and Twitter (as it then was) were overrun with trolls, bots and a blizzard of vaguely plausible but disingenous messages. Many of the messages contradicted one another but, because they were targeted at specific groups, members of other demographics who saw different messages didn't see the contraditions.

This IT-enabled flim-flam certainly played a role in selling different groups of the unsupecting voters a bill of goods (the mis-sold product being Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US).

So, what would've happened if progressives had a Cambridge Analytica equivalent of their own in the run up to the 2016 EU referendum and US presidential votes? Could they have swung the results in different directions? I'm not so sure, because what we were looking at then wasn't just a gap in capabilities but a gap in content and ethics. 

Remember what I said about micro-targeted and often contradictory messages? Yes, delivering those messages was a tech problem, but the content of the messages was as important as the medium. Tech aside, the innovation was to efficiently send contradictory messages tailored to appeal to different sets of voters and to amplify existing misinformation which was already out there in the wild, courtesy of years of mendacious campaigning in the right wing press. Think about that for a moment.

Using that tech wouldn't have worked (at least in the same way) if the people using it had been held back by the moral scruples to make an honest case. To use the example I'm most familiar with, the EU Referendum and the effectiveness of the Leave campaigns:

...But, as I discovered while knocking on doors during the campaign, many Britons believe all sort of bizarre things about the EU that have no basis in fact, and the source of which is ultimately newspapers – for example, that most immigrants to Britain come from the EU, that 20 per cent of the population are EU migrants or that 75 per cent of Britain’s laws are made in Brussels.

Before and during the campaign, the eurosceptic newspapers carried a strong message that EU migrants were causing enormous problems in Britain. They ran front-page after front-page of scare stories about how migrants and refugees were trying to get into the country – often conflating the two groups. Many of these articles were factually incorrect. Even on the day after the Orlando shootings in Florida, the Daily Mail – uniquely among UK papers – led its front page with ‘Fury over plot to let 1.5 million Turks into Britain’. The written press did a great job in reinforcing Vote Leave’s twisted message that thousands of foreigners – whether asylum-seekers, Romanians, Syrians, terrorists or Turks – were all hell-bent on entering the country.

From a piece by Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform.

Ultimately, the Leave campaigns' ability to leverage their big data advantge rested to their willingness to lie shamelessly without fear of retribution. As Charles Grant put it "They exploited the fact that in political advertising, unlike commercial advertising, there are no penalties for untruths".

So I'm not sure that, even with the same resouces, the other side would've been able to win big by upping its big data/social media game. Unless, of course, it was willing to lie as shamelessly itself. The tech was just the delivery system. The weapon itself was made of good old-fahioned lies and bullshit and its effectiveness relied on our old friend the bullshit asymmetry principle, AKA Brandolini's Law ("The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it").

There are two main reasons why I'm not pro-using the latest tech tools to "flood the zone with (our) shit" in an effort to emulate how the bad guys have been winning so far. The first reason is that it's lying and that's just straight wrong.* Secondly, it moves the fight onto the enemy's territory. If the opposing party has no qualms about lying on an industrial scale and you decide to get into a lying contest with them, you're going to lose. 

You'll lose because blurring the lines between lies and truth is more helpful to liars than it is to members of the evidence-based community. So long as there is still some shred of evidence or objective truth out there by which people can judge them, liars and propagandists are vulnerable. When both sides are unreliable and there's no objective standard of truth, you're into a world of "he said she said" and "they're all as bad as each other".** And, aside from direct disinformation, getting there is a win for bad actors from Cambridge Analytica to MAGA influencers to Russian troll farms. Yes, we're circling back to that famous Garry Kasparov quote:

The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

In other words, creating a space where there are no objective standards to which the powerful can be held or which they can judged by. Believe me, you don't want to go there.

So how does this map on to the latest wave of AI-driven political comms? Well, the next image seems to have been a viral anti-MAGA hit. It allgedly upset the MAGA regime so much it led to a Norwegian tourist being refused entry to the Land Of The Free™ for having it on his phone (I think the US side eventually denied that this image was the reason but, honestly, I can wholly believe tat the MAGA crowd are thin-skinned and control-freakish enough to have barred someone for making fun of them):

Meme of J D Vance as a bald, bearded baby

 

And you'd need a heart of stone not to appreciate those pompous assholes being mocked, or the Streisand effect that kicks in when they try to suppress the mockery. 

The problem is ... as far as I know, the viral J D Vance memes were produced using Photoshop, not AI.

As far as I know. But even if they were the products of AI, would reaching for AI be worth it? Clearly you could do this in Photoshop or similar without colluding with the damage AI is doing to the environment, wholesale copyright theft, disrupting creative jobs (no, techbros "disrupting" isn't automatically a good thing - while it may be good to disrupt, say, a terrorist cell, disrupting the lives of people who are just trying to make a living without harming anybody else is a bad thing), widening the already obscene inequlities of wealth and power still further, all in the service of what may well be yet another a very expensive financial bubble.

And that's without considering that AI is asymetrically attractive to bad actors who want to generate big volumes of content quickly without being concerned by troublesome details like truth or ethics. Deepfakes, amplifying existing prejudices (even when there isn't a man like Elon "Roman salute my arse" Musk behind the curtain obviously tweaking his pet AI to let it express its inner MechaHitler)...

... the list of opportunities for plausibly deniable deception & generally messing with people's heads is long and depressing. What I'm seeing is another tech-enabled opportunity for people with no principles to flood the zone with shit in much the same way they did a decade ago. The opportunities for progressives and people who value strightforward messages anchored in reality and something approaching objective truth seem a lot more constrained.

 OK, beyond dumping on AI do I have any thoughts about what would work? Well, the ten years since the last tech attack seem to have been largely years of lessons not learned. But not everywhere. In Finland, they got the memo about going for the harmful content, actively pushing back against fake information, fake images and clickbait being used to attack the principle of informed consent with a programme of education and public infomation aimed at children and adults alike. Another lesson not learned in too many places by too many politicians is there are plenty of progressive policies which are poplar and can cut through, even against the screeching coordinated right wing media claque, if they're presented clearly and with conviction. Just ask Mr Mamdani. And remember the lesson of the J D Vance memes; these militant far right characters are freakishly weird. Stop normalising their batshittery and mock them - it's easy when you try and the best part is that we're quite smart enough to do it right now with without the help of AI.

 

*Yes, I know that technically there are cases where it may be right to lie (e.g. lying to a knife-wielding maniac about the whereabouts of his intended victim) but that's not the sort of scenario we're considering here.

**This both-sides-ism already happened during the Brexit debate - even though the vast majority of points made by the Remain campaign were broadly correct and borne out by subsequent events, the reaction of the Leaver campaigners to their lies being called out was to find a dodgy statement from one of the millions of Remainers (or to make one up) and shout "See! Both sides!" blithely ignoring the fact that they'd been caught red-handed themselves.

Secrets and spies

So the Pentagon leaker, turns out to have been (apparently) an immature nerd trying just to impress a bunch of teenage boys with his edgelord antics,* rather than a guy who sold secrets for money, or a Philby/Maclean-style sleeper agent recruited by ideological fellow travellers from abroad.

The aspect I find more interesting than the confused motivations of a messed-up 21 year old was raised in this piece by Daniel Drezner. Drezner lists the material that we know has been leaked and concludes that it seems pretty "meh":

You know what? I’m not seeing much in these reports that I find particularly surprising or shocking. All of these assessments mirror the takes one would get on each of these questions from analysts with zero access to classified intelligence.

In other words, the Kremlin could have deduced most of what Teixeira leaked from open source intelligence (OSINT), so having a mole in the other side's camp doesn't necessarily give an opponent that big an edge.

Coincidentally, John Quiggin has reacted to the leaks by reposting a piece he wrote in 2003, in which argues that the effectiveness of spies and spying in general is very much over-rated.

 

The basic lesson of game theory for a game of bluff like that of espionage is that, as long as it is possible for counterspies to generate misleading information most of the time, spies are useless even when their information happens to be correct. If the defence plays optimally, the spymaster can never have any reason to believe one piece of information produced by spies and disbelieve another.

The biggest problem isn't, though, that spying is mostly ineffective, but that it provides the justification for having an intrusive intelligence apparatus which ends up being deployed against the state's own citizens rather than against hostile foreign powers:

The spy myth clearly served the interests of intelligence agencies, which prospered during the 20th century more than any set of spies before them. The real beneficiaries, however, were the counterintelligence agencies or, to dispense with euphemisms, the secret police, of both Western and Communist countries. The powers granted to them for their struggle against armies of spies were used primarily against domestic dissidents.

Quiggin's critique of intelligence services over reach seems as relevant to me now as it was when he wrote it in 2003, in the wake of 9/11. Perhaps it's even more relevant now when the organs of the state are partnering up with hugely well-resourced surveillance capitalists to keep an ever closer watch on their own citizens.

*If Teixeira had been a 51 year old billionaire, rather than a 21 year old national guard, he could have just bought Twitter to impress his teenage fanboys.

 

 

Baiting your hook with virtue

I've been fascinated, in a slightly horrified way, by how right wing propagandists constantly try to reframe public discourse by the repetition of a small vocabulary of loaded words and phrases. The pejorative use of "woke" is seems to be the most common of these linguitic tics right now, but accusing your opponent of "virtue signalling" is still widely used as a catch-all way of dismissing an opposing view.

These sort of prefabricared buzz phrases fit together like Lego blocks, so you don't have to go far on social media before you trip over people complaining angrily about "woke virtue signallers". The point seems to be to keep using the same linguistic cues, over, and over, and over again in that hope that, thanks to availabilty bias, these negative connotations will stick in people's minds like mud.

The assumptions underlying this sort of language are, of course, highly questionable. What does "woke" really mean, and is it necessarily a bad thing? Are all examples of alleged "virture signalling" really always examples of people insincerely paying lip service to virtuous behaviour merely to look good? These are the things the propagandists using this sort of language doesn't want you to think about.

None of this stuff is new, but I did come across a new phrase that underlines how incoherent the right's weaponisation of "woke" and "virtue signalling" is. I was listening to a recent episode of Michael Rosen's Word of Mouth* radio programme about language and how we use it. The episode dealt with the language of online dating and introduced me to a new phrase I'd never heard before; "wokefishing".

 Wokefishing is a more specific form of "catfishing", which is deceptively creating a fake online identity to lure somebody into a relationship under flase pretenses. In wokefishing, the romance scammer pretends to subscribe to a set of what people are shorthanding as "woke" beliefs, which could cover things like social justice, women's rights, minority rights, tolerance, green issues and so on, in order to lure somebody into a relationship.

Putting this new word next to the way the right weaponises "woke" and "social justice" prompts some interesting thoughts:

Firstly, culture warriors on the right want us to see "woke" as a pejorative term of abuse. If people are pretending to be woke and using woke identities it to make themselves more attractive to potential partners, this suggests that being woke is an attractive trait in a dating profile, a plus, like interesting, good sense of humour, honest, etc. So not only is it unclear how being actively opposed to social justice is a bad thing, as the "anti-woke" brigade claim, but wokeness is also a plus on a more superficial, social capital, level.

Which brings us, secondly, to the crime of "virtue signalling". In a literal sense, that's what wokefishers are doing; pretending to believe in virtuous things for selfish and cynical ends, while actually not believing in them at all. So who is doing the "virtue signalling" here? By definition, the people who are wokefishing aren't woke. Woke people saying that they subscribe to woke beliefs, or even better, honestly saying that they live by those beliefs and try to advance their principles in the world aren't "virtue signalling", they're just being honest about their core beliefs.

So we've got that rare beast, a genuine example of virtue signalling in the wild. And the culprits are, by definition, people who aren't woke. 

I would say that this is an example psychological projection from the right's keyboard warriors. It sounds good, but I'd be falling into the same trap as the people who routinely use "virtue signalling" as a taunt; using a superficially sciency, technical-sounding term that's really quite sloppy and imprecise. After all, the term psychological projection comes out of Freudian analysis, a field which doesn't exactly come top of the class when it comes to having a rigorous evidence base. 

 Not psychological projection, then. An older name will do. Hypocrisy.

 *Link to the episode on BBC Sounds here. Also available on at least one podcast app (I listen to Word of Mouth on Stitcher)

 

"Anti-wokism" - back to the bad old days

According to Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson "wokeism" is a "mind virus". Before stepping down as Conservative party chairman, Oliver "the privet hedges of a free people" Dowden dunked on "wokeism" at greater length (but with no greater clarity) in a speech to the hard right US Heritage Foundation:

“Rogue states are seeking to challenge the international order. And at the precise point when our resolve ought to be strongest, a pernicious new ideology is sweeping our societies...

...It goes by many names. In Britain, its adherents sometimes describe themselves as ‘social justice warriors’. They claim to be ‘woke’, awakened to the so-called truths of our societies. But wherever they are found, they pursue a common policy inimical to freedom.”

The use of "woke" as a catch-all snarl word in the right's culture wars is relatively new. The substance of the fight they're picking isn't. I was reminded of this when I came across an old Daily Express cartoon that somebody had posted on Twitter. A picture is worth a thousand words, but I'll repeat what I tweeted just to hammer home what's wrong with this picture: 

The Conservatives picking a fight over Culture War talking points is nothing new. See this Express cartoon from the 80s which did the same thing back when people could openly attack things like anti-racism without even hiding behind the euphemism of being "anti-woke".

I think a lot about this cartoon. Especially the upside-down figure labelled "council power". What does that even mean? Vampiric local authorities sucking honest Tory ratepayers dry? And hammers & sickles to label everything they don't like Marxist. Batshit then & now.

There's not much to add to this - the war against "wokeism" is a war against social justice, solidarity, equality and inclusiveness. It's a war fought for the attitudes encapsulated in this cartoon, a war for division, for othering, for punching down and keeping the designated outgroups firmly in their place. 

The war starts with words and memes, with mockery and humiliation. The end point is action. And, if you still haven't joined the dots between images, words and action, remember the Heritage Foundation, the "think tank" (lobby group) that Oliver Dowden crafted his "anti-woke" talking points for? 

 

Since its founding, the Heritage Foundation has become “inextricably intertwined” with Republican administrations and lawmakers in Washington. Heritage brands itself as a beacon of the intellectual conservative establishment; in reality, it is an organization that regularly spouts hateful ideas on par with organizations like the Family Research Council (FRC), which has earned designation from the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. Much like its peer groups, Heritage dedicates significant energy to extremist policy recommendations that hinder access to abortion and birth control and promote discrimination against LGBTQ individuals...

...Kay Coles James became president of The Heritage Foundation in the beginning of 2018; she had served as a Heritage board member for over a decade. James previously worked in the George W. Bush administration and as Virginia’s secretary of health and human services. James has compared LGBTQ people to “drug addicts, alcoholics, adulterers, or ‘anything else sinful,’” and has also tweeted that “abortion is a form of discrimination,” attempting to paint her anti-abortion work in the same vein as fighting racism.

Pro-Lies.org
 

It starts with words. It ends with action. It ends with reversing decades of hard-won progress overnight. Goodbye Roe vs Wade, it was nice knowing you...

Anti-vaxxers and yellow stars - a deliberate provocation?

 

This nonsense is not OK on any level.

 

NurPhoto/Getty Images

In any hierarchy of crassly offensive gestures, anti-vaxxers appropriating the yellow star badge used by the Nazis to mark out millions of Jews for abuse and, ultimately, murder comes pretty close to the top. But what is there to say about this, other than the obvious point that it's a self-evidently terrible, insulting, ignorant comparison?

Talia Bracha Lavin uses this wholly imagined conflation of the control of a pandemic disease and genocide as a teachable moment, in a Substack essay on the real connection between the Holocaust, disease and vaccination. In this case the disease was typhus, which tore through the crowded ghettoes and camps of  occupied Europe and the Reich. 

The connection with vaccination was the heroic and clandestine work of people like Rudolf Weigl, who created a typhus vaccine in the 1930s. When the Nazis seized Poland, he was ordered to produce the vaccine for the use of the occupiers but, at great personal risk, smuggled tens of thousands of vaccine doses into the Warsaw Ghetto. Or Buchenwald inmate Ludwik Fleck, a  Jewish biologist who the Nazis used to develop another typhus vaccine in a camp laboratory. Fleck, again at appalling personal risk, managed to deny effective batches of vaccine to his captors, while creating doses real vaccine which he reserved to inoculate his fellow prisoners.

It's a fascinating piece of history which I wasn't previously aware of, and you can read the whole thing here.

The subset of anti-vaxxers appropriating the yellow star is, from the viewpoint of anybody with any sense of proportion or historical perspective, being needlessly, horrendously offensive. But why would anyone do this? Mere ignorance might seem to be the reason, but many of these anti-vaxx groups seem to have well-funded backers (AstroTurf organisations like HART and Us For Them) and sophisticated media strategies, so my guess is that the generation of outrage is quite deliberate and calculated in this case.

It also fits in with strategies which contrarian reactionaries have already successfully used to gain attention, trip up their opponents and claim unearned victim status. There could be several ways in which such provocateurs/trolls benefit by weaponising offence. 

1. Provoke, then double down. If your aim isn't to engage in good faith argument, but to dismay and wrongfoot opponents, do or say something obnoxious. When angry people push back, don't even try to defend what you said or did. Instead, throw their reaction back in their faces and accuse them of over-sensistivity, of being "triggered." "Facts" you can say "don't care about your feelings." Claim a performative "win" because you kept your cool and made them "emotional" and "irrational":

"I triggered you, you snowflake. That means I win."

2. Use provocation to game social media algorithms and the attention economy:

By privileging posts that promote “engagement”—meaning people reading, liking or replying to posts on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram—Facebook ensured that people stayed on its platform for much longer.

What's engaging? Among other things, content that makes people angry enough to respond and get into arguments. If you can be obnoxious enough to instigate fights on social media, but not quite obnoxious enough to get yourself kicked off whatever platform you're on, you and your social media platform can enjoy a toxic, symbiotic relationship. Posting a selfie of you and your anti-vaxx buddies doing Holocaust cosplay carries a low risk of getting you kicked off a platform like Twitter, but a high probablity of attracting hostile engagement from normies who find your gesture sickening. This form of engagement mirrors the cynical old hacks' slogan about how the sensational and shocking sells newspapers or TV airtime: "If it bleeds, it leads."

3. Flip the script, play the victim. On one level, the people appropriating the yellow stars are already, playing at being victims, putting on the literal fancy dress of opression without actually being oppressed in any meaningful way. But they can also rhetorically claim victim status. The title of a book by professional contrarian Claire Fox shows how it's done. It's called I Find That Offensive:

"When I say whatever I like, that's my free speech. If you dare to push back, that's your cancel culture."

This is the "triggered" meme with a twist. Instead of merely arguing that push back against a provocateur being obnoxious is proof that the troll's opponents are weak and emotional, Fox and her fellow bad faith actors argue that, if you push back against abuse or punching down you are the oppressor, an enemy of "free speech." Obviously there's a contradiction between 1. ("You're a weak, emotional soyboy cuck") and 3. ("You're oppressing me with your cancel culture, you bully"), but bad faith actors will just ignore the contradictions in their own positions and bluster on regardless:

"The enemy is both strong and weak. 

By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak."  (from Umberto Eco's essay, Eternal Fascism)

As far as I'm aware, Claire Fox herself hasn't actively supported the yellow star-sporting anti-vaxxers. She's a mainstream media personality, a former Radio 4 regular and (God help us), a member of the House of Lords and has a reputation (albeit unearned) to preserve. But she and her fellow enablers demonstrate how defending the indefensible in the name of free speech is typically done. 

A bad faith actor in her position isn't there to directly voice the worst, most divisive and abusive messages. Her role is to provide an intellectual fig-leaf for her side in the culture wars, to dog-whistle support for being able to punch down, to be abusive towards minorities, to be grossly offensive in the name of "free speech." 

She doesn't personally sit on the football terraces booing a racially diverse team of England footballers when they take the knee. Her role is to give the people who do a veneer of respectability - they're not intolerant bullies punching down at minorities and the people who dare to show solidarity with them, she insinuates, but free speech warriors who are themselves being oppressed by "cancel culture." 

From a position of apprent respectability as a public "intellectual", people like Fox actively and cynically embolden the worst among us to equate free speech with their inalienable right to say anything, no matter how hateful, divisive and, yes, offensive while dismissing any counter-argument as Orwellian "cancel culture." 

Yes, Claire I do find *that* (your unqualified support for punching down and the presumed absolute right to cause offence without consequences) offensive. 

If I was a wedding guest and started insulting and abusing the bride and groom for no other reason than me deciding that I have absolute free speech, that I'm damn well entitled to say what I like and if you don't like it, tough, facts don't care about your feelings, you'd rightly call me a jerk.

Insult the memories of six million murdered and countless more bereaved, abused and traumatised for no other reason than being themselves and you're a jerk times several million.

"Instrumentalization of the tragedy of Jews who suffered, were humiliated, marked with a yellow star, and finally isolated in ghettos and murdered during the Holocaust, in order to argue against vaccination that save human lives is a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline." (From the Auschwitz Memorial's Twitter feed).

 

Raptured into the VIP lane

Remember John Nelson Darby, that very well-connected chap who came up with the idea of the godly being physically taken up into heaven in the Rapture when the End Times kick off? The Exclusive Brethren guy? Turns out the Exclusive Brethren are still a thing. And they're still extremely well-connected:

At least £180 million – and up to £300 million – in ventilator and PPE contracts appear to have been awarded to companies linked to an evangelical movement described as a “cult” by former members which has multiple ties to the Conservative Party, Byline Times can reveal.

The Exclusive Brethren is a subset of a Christian group, often described as Plymouth Brethren in the UK. It came to prominence after being investigated by the Charity Commission over whether it was delivering enough “public good” to maintain its charitable status.

The sect, whose members are subject to strict disciplinary practices, enjoys tax reliefs and rebates reportedly worth as much as £11 million a year.

 Byline Times

Apparently the movement has stayed true to its establishment roots and, ironically, these committed evangelical Christians are still doing their bit to ensure that the meek are as far from inheriting the earth as they ever were. It's also still a bit cultish, apparently.

Blackmail is such a dirty word

So farewell then, Matt Hancock. Caught red handed in precisely the same sort of sleaze and corruption in which Boris Johnson and the rest of his cabinet are almost certainly mired just as deeply. The Sun probably has as much dirt on Hancock's cabinet colleagues, but chooses not to release it:

Reportedly, there is a huge safe or vault in The Sun office, full of embarrassing (and in some cases probably incriminating) items on politicians and celebrities which remain (for the time being) unpublished. The Sun vault is also referred to as the "black museum" by Fleet Street hacks, and blackmail may be one of its purposes. Another purpose may be hushing up crimes committed by friends or supporters of Murdoch, including sex crimes later exposed under the police's Operation Yewtree. The retention of so much unpublished material is hard to justify: either these stories are in the public interest and should be published, or they are not and so should not be held in reserve.

Rational Wiki summary of a Byline Times piece.

Apparently there will be a (probably toothless) investigation into who leaked the incriminating material on Hancock. A more interesting investigation, which won't take place, would be into why Hancock was targeted in particular, and equally sleazy colleagues spared.

Three possibilities spring to mind:

1. Straighforward scapegoating - the government has so far managed to dodge a lot of the blame for the excess deaths and rampant corruption which has characterised their pandemic response but maybe somebody's decided they can't escape all the blame for ever, and Matt Hancock has been set up as the sacrificial example to absolve his boss and colleagues of their share of the blame.
2. Something more personal - maybe Hancock is felt not to have opened up the economy quickly enough for the Murdoch media and he's being made an example of pour encourager les autres to be even more reckless with public health.*
3. Something even more personal - something to do with a power struggle within government, involving one of Murdoch's most loyal fifth columnists in goverment, Michael Gove and his creature, Cummings.

Was Hancock thrown to the wolves at random because they just had to lighten the troika somehow, or was he the victim of a targeted character assassination because somebody important wants a change of policy or personnel? The great British public, in whose interest The Sun allegedly publishes such stories, will probably never be allowed to know the truth.

 

 *If you want a flavour of the Murdoch empire's real feelings about lockdowns and the associated public health measures, here's one of their more unmuzzled outlets, the US Fox News, describing distancing measures in the pandemic as "politicized coronavirus hysteria":

 "The riots have ripped the mask off the mainstream media politicized coronavirus hysteria. When it was politically convenient, the media shamed and attacked people who wanted to reopen their stores or even gather at the beach,” Cornell Law School professor and media critic William A. Jacobson told Fox News. “Now that rioters and looters are gathering in large numbers, the media no longer cares about social distancing, because the media sympathizes with them.”

Brian Flood, Fox News, 1st of June 2020 - no link, because it's divisive garbage, obviously.

The bro smirk, the smirk of dominance

 

In yet more Britain Trump news, Former Guy may be disappearing ever more inexorably into madness and failure but, Cheshire Cat-like, his trademark smirk lingers on, on the faces of the Trump tribute band currently governing the UK. 

Today's pound shop Donald is Grant Shapps, the über-Trumpy get-rich-quick grifter who used to pretend to be a multimillion-dollar web marketer under an assumed name. Here he is hardly even trying to justify reversing the irreversible, or being wildly inconsistent about controlling borders in a pandemic:

Portugal has been added to the "amber list" for travel just a week after thousands of English football fans flew to Porto for the Champions League final.

Grant Shapps, said it was a "difficult decision", but he was smirking at the time.

pic.twitter.com/TNzYk2ttRF

— Simon Gosden. Esq. #fbpe 3.5% 🕷🇪🇺🇬🇧🏴‍☠️🦠💙 (@g_gosden) June 3, 2021

Of course, he's not alone. 

 

From Patel to Johnson the perma-smirk of invulnerability is now as much a part of the Conservative brand as the Tory Power Stance.

 As Ophelia Benson said of the Trump smirk, back in the days of Former Guy's pomp:

It’s the bro smirk, the smirk of dominance.

It would be interesting to see if he's still smirking now that his influence doesn't even extend to being heard on his low-traffic blog (I feel your pain, Donny) and how long the smirk will persist on the lips of the Britain Trump crew who were, presumably, counting on their special relationship with Former Guy to make a success of "Global Britain."

https://twitter.com/g_gosden/status/1400542223461199875?s=20

Public to the left of him, AstroTurf to the right, stuck in the middle with Britain Trump

 

Remember when the USA was being run by that strange orange whackadoodle who used to say crazy shit about injecting yourself with bleach? Remember how that Very Stable Genius saw the world exclusively in relation to himself, and paid this "compliment" to our very own Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson?

"They're saying Britain Trump. They call him Britain Trump. That's a good thing. They like me over there."

The bleach advice aged like milk, but while no literate Brit ever called Johnson "Britain Trump", except to mock the massive satsuma-faced toddler,* the comparison has resonated with people who are far smarter and more thoughtful than Trump himself. For Simon Wren-Lewis, the parallels between the two are tragic rather than comic:

One of the persistent features of Trump’s period as president was his obsession with Fox News. He preferred to get his information from Fox News than internal government briefings. In time Fox News started to understand this, and some of its journalists started directly addressing him in their shows. Why did Trump do this? Because all populists are narcissists who want to be admired their people. Most of the time, Fox News obliged...

...If we believe Cummings, Johnson too is obsessed by the media read by ‘his people’, and in particular his own paper The Telegraph. He looks to them to check he is being admired. So when this and other right wing papers started publishing anti-lockdown nonsense, it got to him. As the Prime Minister who had locked down the economy he was no longer admired by these newspapers. This overrode any ability to understand the reasons why lockdown was necessary (and quick and hard lockdowns particularly), so he became over the summer a lockdown skeptic. 

The parallels between Trump and Johnson are striking but they're not exactly breaking news. What is interesting is where the far right/libertarian pressure that drove Britain Trump to botch the lockdowns is coming from. Because the "anti-lockdown nonsense" Wren-Lewis talks about didn't come from out of nowhere.

As Wren-Lewis points out, a lot of it is being propagated by the right-wing press, presumably reflecting the agenda of its oligarch owners.

But what's behind the Covid denialists who posted photos of empty NHS wards and claimed that the pandemic's a hoax? or the celebrity bobblehead who whinged that he paid the salary of NHS staff, who should be thanking him, rather than the other way round?

Did this furious anti-mask, anti-vaxx, anti-NHS anti-statist intervention arise spontaneously from the grass roots? An earlier post by Simon Wren-Lewis presents evidence that this is probably not the case. Back in 2018, he blogged about where the UK public was at, and it didn't seem to be with the small state libertarian vision of freedom from the big state:

When the public are asked about who should own and run various activities, there is clear support for more rather than less public involvement....

...Note that only about 10% want privatisation of the NHS, which has continued rapidly under this government. A government that reduces ernment spending and taxes, and pushes privatisation of the NHS, seems like a government of the few and not the many.

The post-pandemic outpouring of appreciation for our very statist National Heath Service seems to validate what Simon says.Whatever you think about the claps for carers, or the media focus on Captain Tom's fundraising efforts, appreciation for the institutions we have and the people who work for them seems to be genuine. Applications for nursing courses for autumn 2021 were up nearly a third from the previous year. 

You might still argue that Brits (or at least the English majority in our fracturing Union) are socially conservative, but you'd have a way harder time arguing that they're libertarian small statists.

There's evidence that the "lockdown scepticism" that didn't come directly from the right wing press was largely the result of an AstroTurf campaign funded by people with deep pockets and the same far right-libertarian agenda as the right wing media owners. A by-no-means-exhaustive list of examples includes:

• UsforThem

UsforThem, a parents' lobbying group, appears to operate as part of a network that disseminates pseudoscience on the pandemic, for instance, around the role of schools in transmission, masks, safety measures, as well as other issues such as PCR tests and COVID-19 death certification...

...In June, UsforThem coordinated a pre-action legal letter to Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, obtained by Byline Times under Freedom of Information, threatening the Government with a judicial review if it did not re-open schools without safety measures.

The letter was prepared by the same global multi-billion-dollar law firm, DLA Piper, which has advised the Government on its COVID-19 response. (Nafeez Ahmed, Byline Times).

• The Oxford COVID-19 Evidence Service, a disinformation hub apparently cooked up by individuals linked to finance, the American right and a network of right wing lobby groups. The Oxford COVID-19 Evidence Service's dubious claims seem to have been thoroughly debunked, but not before undermining pblic trust in public health responses to the pandemic:

The damage to public discourse has been done. Large segments of the population seem to be convinced that the scientific community is fundamentally divided on how to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. But this is untrue. (Byline Times).

This has worrying echoes of big tobacco's concerted, and unfounded, attempts to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on the links between smoking and cancer. Doubt is their product.

• Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART)

HART was co-founded by Graham Hutchinson, who has coordinated the group prior to and since its inception. He was listed as a member of the group until mid-February.

Hutchinson is an active proponent of COVID-19 pseudoscience and other conspiratorial disinformation. He has claimed that “vaccination is pointless” and implied that vaccines are part of a genocidal global conspiracy: “An urgent message for those wanting a Vaccine Passport. Do you realise your passport will need to be kept up-to-date which means they could at any point, for example, say you needed to have a vaccine a week to do anything? #Cashcow #Control #Genocide.” ...

...Elsewhere, [Hutchinson] tweeted that “99% of the corona bollocks was to get rid of Trump” and praised Donald Trump for being “against climate” and “chasing paediphile [sic] rings”. (again, Byline Times)

• Then there are wealthy individuals on the libertarian right, like Simon Dolan, the Monaco tax exile who took Matt Hancock and Education Secretary Gavin Williamson to court over the restrictions, arguing the Coronavirus regulations were "the most onerous restrictions to personal liberty" and furiously denounces both public health measures and any suggestion that he promotes dangerous conspiracy nonsense (which he self-evidently does). Or the property tycoon Richard Tice, who has raged against people staying away from offices for reasons which have nothing at all to do with the waning profitability of his huge commercial property portfolio, obviously.

• The Great Barrington Declaration advocating a ‘herd immunity’ approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, a product of the Charles Koch Foundation-funded American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).

• As Nafeez Ahmed's article points out, the Conservative Party’s own COVID Recovery Group (formerly the European Research Group) seems to be tied in with this shady lobbying network because of course it is.

• And then there's the Reclaim Party, fronted by that NHS-hating celebrity bobblehead. Apparently the asset manager and political donor  Jeremy Hosking, who came in at 351 in the 2019 Sunday Times Rich List, provided £5 million for the bobblehead to spend time allegedly campaigning for the position of London Mayor, while splashing his anti-"woke" anti-lockdown, anti-socialised healthcare talking points all over the front pages of compliant newspapers (it's amazing what £5 million will do for the profile of a flaky no-hope candidate). 

 

Attack of the celebrity bobbleheads.

I could go on, but you get the picture. You've got a public which is broadly OK with the idea of socialised healthcare, and have been broadly amenable to the various measures needed to get the country through the pandemic on one side.** On the others you have a few polemicists in the right wing-media, speaking out on behalf of a largely AstroTurf lockdown backlash being fabricated by a tiny clique within the economic elite, afraid of the inevitable big government element of any serious response.

And in the middle is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, paralysed by indecision, like a donkey between two hay bales.

Boris Boris Johnson GIF from Boris GIFs

***

 

*© Stuart Maconie.

** There are real people who are very much not OK with lockdown measures, but the objections are, as far as I can see, to do with individual economic circumstances, not the sort of implacable ideological opposal to the principle of lockdowns we've seen from the activists who've been trying to undermine them. If your job is the one that goes, or you're not eligible for furlough, or you're one of the left-behind self-employed who fell through the cracks, of course you're going to be desperate and angry.      

*** .gif credit.    

Low-maintenance voters

With all the desperate flag-waving and public displays of jingoism, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Boris Johnson's UK is a tribute act to the Thatcher years. But it occurs to me that one thing has changed fundamentally; aspiration. 

Right through the Thatcher years and beyond, the Conservatives and New Labour, made a very conscious electoral pitch to "aspirational" voters. Way into the noughties, pundits were referencing the upwardly-mobile "Mondeo Man" and his ilk as the demographic groups that were key to gaining and maintaining power.

The canny shift the modern Conservative Party and its media enablers have made seems to be to mobilise an entirely different* set of voters. After a decade of austerity and stagnant wages, like Trump, they've identified a new group of voters to woo. People who don't believe in aspiration any more, because they don't see it in action, but are furious and want to punish somebody for what their lives have become. 

Angry people, made too cynical to believe that either own lives, or the lives of their kids will ever get better, but who'll vote for anybody who can turn their anger on an external enemy; migrants, minorities, the "woke."

It makes sense in its own warped terms. In a post-austerity, post-Brexit, post-Covid world, it's going to be tough to appeal to aspiration. If you feed aspirations you will eventually be expected to actually fulfil aspirations. If you mobilise voters with no aspirations beyond seeing somebody else worse off, then you literally don't have to do anything except make the designated hate groups' lives shittier. Which is way easier to achieve than actually making people's lives better.

You have to hand it to the UK's post-Trump Trumpists - by finding angry people with low expectations and keeping them angry they've built themselves the ultimate low-maintenance political base. People so cynical that they no longer expect their lives to get better, but will vote for anybody who'll take their pain out on somebody else.

By weaponising spite, they've brought a whole new meaning to the phrase "the tyranny of low expectations" and come pretty damn close to actual political genius.

 Efficient sadopopulism. Mondeo Man didn't see that one coming.

 

 

* I say "entirely different, but it's quite possible that many of todays angry and disillusioned voters may be formerly aspirational Mondeo Men or Worcester Women for whom the idea of upward mobility has become a sick joke.

 

Update

 Synchronicity:

The Ford Mondeo has reached the end of the road, the company announced today.

The saloon car that became a byword for ‘Mondeo Man’ – the middle-ground voter that could swing elections – has been killed off by the rise in popularity of sports utility vehicles and the push towards electrification, the manufacturer has confirmed today.

More here.

 

Banging your head against a brick wall, AKA Twitter moderation

 

I've just been taught a slightly annoying, but worryingly instructive, lesson.

Contrary to my New Year's resolution, I'm probably still spending more time on Twitter than I ought. Then I got this message:

Hi Andrew King Your account, *******, has been locked for violating the Twitter Rules. Specifically for: Violating our rules against promoting or encouraging suicide or self-harm.

Oh boy. What terrible message had I posted? Well, here's my offending tweet, in all its gory glory:

I guess deciding to *stop* repeatedly banging your head against a brick wall doesn't actually count as a policy. 

But it would sure feel better than continuing to repeatedly bang your head against a brick wall.

OK. Well, you could argue this was a facetious reply (judge for yourself: screenshot in the context of the tweet I was replying to at the bottom of this post).* And, sure, it's a clichéd metaphor, so I should definitely hand myself in to the style police.

But "encouraging suicide or self-harm?" Seriously? Even if you were totally unfamiliar with the idiom and took those two sentences literally, the literal sense is that banging your head against a brick wall is a bad thing and stopping this activity would definitely feel better.

Anyway, I was given the options of deleting the offending tweet or appealing against the suspension, so I appealed. After all, I figured, some key words had probably been picked up by an algorithm, so if I appealed, presumably an actual human would look at the tweet and realise that it had been flagged in error?

 Wrong, apparently:

 Hello,    

Thank you for your patience as we reviewed your appeal request for account, *******, regarding the following:

Our support team has determined that a violation did take place, and therefore we will not overturn our decision.
 
You will not be able to access Twitter through your account due to violations of the Twitter Rules, specifically our rules around:

Violating our rules against promoting or encouraging suicide or self-harm

In order to restore account functionality, you can resolve the violations by logging into your account and completing the on-screen instructions.
 
Thanks,

Further violations will lead to suspension of your account.  

Twitter

So I ended up deleting the tweet to get back on the platform. Annoying and slighly worrying, in the sense that another innocent metaphor could see me banned from the platform, which would be irritating, given that I've done nothing wrong, but I'll live.

But what makes me slightly more than irritated and more like angry and concerned, is the context. Moderation, after all, is there for a reason. There are genuinely anti-social, threatening, harrassing, violent messages, hate speech and, yes, actual messages which really do promote or encourage suicide or self-harm.

I know that because, like almost everyone else on Twitter, I've seen some pretty unpleasant stuff.  For example, one of this individual's tweets popped up in my timeline the other week:

 Yep, a real life, out and proud white supremacist Nazi, praising George Lincoln Rockewell, an actual, if clownishly ineffective, Nazi. I had a look it this account's feed and reported a few genuinely dodgy tweets. With, as far as I can tell, no result at all. 

Twitter may be cool hosting white supremacists and Nazis, but props to Linktree, a social media landing page which, old fogey that I am, I hadn't heard of before, but which at least has the gumption to kick creeps like this off its platform. Here he is whining about it:

Sadly, Blogger and YouTube, like Twitter, apparently still seem to think that this sort of content is OK (Odysee, like Linktree, is a thing I'd not even heard of but, as for Gab, we all know that like Parler it's just a sewer of conspiracy theories and far-right wingnuttery).

 So there we are. Use a perfectly normal English idiom on Twitter and risk having you account permanently deleted. Be an actual Nazi-supporting white supremacist with an account that exists to direct hate against minorities and your political opponents and Jack Dorsey's minions apparently see no problem at all (ditto the people at Google who run YouTube and Blogger). Something is very much not OK here.

What's going on? Is it that, for all their "community guidelines", social media platforms have a vested interest in keeping extremist clickbaity accounts alive, because controversy drives engagement and grows the platform? That would explain why it took so long for multple breaches of community guidelines by individuals like Katie Hopkins to build up to a Twitter ban, much engagement and hate having already been generated before any action was taken.

Apparently, all it takes is provocation-driven engagement and the brass neck to deny what you quite obviously are to keep the Twitter police off your back:

Anyone with eyes, and/or ears and a functioning brain?

Hmmm...

*Context of my tweet:

 

Paper bear; a real conspiracy between frenemies

 

I just heard a passing reference to something which reminded me that everything you (think) you know really can be wrong. Hugely and dangerously wrong. 

Back in the Cold War, specifically in the late 1950s and early '60s, the Missile Gap was a thing. The idea that the Soviet Union had an overwhelming numerical superiority in nuclear missiles. It was a notion largely kicked off by some boastful comments of Khrushchev's which were probably intended as an unsubtle bluff to warn off the US. 

 The US media and military-industrial complex picked up Khrushchev's ball and ran with it:

 "Over six columns starting on January 23 [1960], [US journalist Joseph] Alsop laid out the case for believing the Soviets were well ahead in missile development. He built his argument on Power's premise that with 150 ICBMs and 150 intermediate-range missiles firing on European targets, the Soviets could destroy all of NATO's nuclear weapons. He then set out to explain that if the Soviet missile factories were as efficient as the factory that produced SAC's Atlas rockets, then Khrushchev would have 150 ICBMs in ten months. Alsop charged the Eisenhower administration with playing Russian roulette in refusing to accelerate the arms race because of lack of firm proof that the Soviets had as many missiles as they could have."

"The public controversy was actually only the tip of the iceberg, for the real sparks flew within the American intelligence community, particularly between the US Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency. Air Force analysts claimed that there could be hundreds of Soviet ICBMs, whereas CIA analysts argued that there were no more than a dozen.

We now know that there were only four."

It's worth pausing to let the weight of that fact sink in. A nuclear arms race fueled by a public and military perception that other side had hundreds of ICBMs when, in fact, it had four. 

Eisenhower was damn right to speak up about the malign influence of the military-industrial complex. 

There are two aspects of this story which seem to illustrate more general truths:

1. There are plenty of flat-out insane conspiracy theories swirling around these days, which deserve to be mocked and rejected. But the example of the illusory Missile Gap shows that sometimes, some  groups of insiders really can engineer real conpiracies against the laity

2. Sometimes, the aggressive interests of deadly enemies coincide in ways which make the world a far worse place for the majority who are just trying to get on with their lives without harming anybody. Khrushchev wanted to signal strength, in order to make his enemies fear him and leave him alone. The US military-industrial complex needed a credible threat in order to maintain its power, influence and funding. In a sense, both frenemies got some of what they wanted, while an emergent threat to the entire human race, in the form of a nuclear arms race grew out of both sides' attempts to bolster their own positions. 

There's a similar symbiosis between, for example, violent terrorist organisations, trying to provoke states into a backlash which they hope will validate the terrorists' cause and recruit more followers, and states' military-industrial-security complexes, which grow and become more powerful, the greater the perceived terrorist threat.

Sources: Dwayne A Day at The Space Review and Eric Alterman at Media Matters, reviewing Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali.

Counter-Reformation 2.0

After the high drama of the Trumpists' attempted putsch, there's a temptation to think that putting the violent, heavily-armed minority back in its box will solve the problem. And certain direct, specific actions would be good. Identify all the perps and their enablers, then ensure that they face legal consequences, to publicly demonstrate that people who indulge in this sort of violence and intimidation don't get to be above the law. 

And, probably most important, disrupt the violent far-right and white supremacist networks which have self-evidently infiltrated various police departments. Black folks won't have needed the wake-up call of the attack on the Capitol to alert them to the fact that this shit has been going on for far too long.

All of this is necessary, but not sufficient. Firefighting this outbreak of violence is good, but it won't solve the underlying problems which got America into this mess. A thought-provoking post on the Minor Heresies blog (no less immediately relevant for being posted last September) views the state of early 21st Century America through the historical lens of Early Modern Europe, the Counter-Reformation, and what happens when an established order loses power and tries to claw it back:

"First, I’d like you to imagine yourself as an average peasant in Western Europe in 1516, the year before Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. The Protestant Reformation is not yet even an idea. There is no “Catholic Church.” There is just “The Church.” It permeates personal, family, economic, and political life. For someone living in Koln, or Naples or Lyon in 1516 there is nothing else. Sure, there are a few Jews about, and you’ve heard, perhaps, of Muslims and Hindus, but these are oddities. Tuck this idea away for later; there was a time when, for the people of Western Europe, there was only one spiritual option, and no concept of any other.

Then, after 1517, there were other versions of Christianity. Lutheranism, of course, and Calvinism. John Knox took Luther’s ideas to Scotland and founded the Presbyterian Church. Suddenly, there were options. The Catholic Church did not tolerate this loss of power and preeminence.

The century between the mid-1500s and mid-1600s is the era of what is now known as the Counter Reformation. It was fought on an array of battle fronts:  political, legal, military, theological, and organizational. The Vatican engaged in diplomacy, cracked down on dissent, and fomented wars. It also formed new organizations, such as the Jesuits, set scholars to work clarifying its theology, and actually engaged in some internal reforms. I won’t dig too deeply into this, since the Counter Reformation has filled a stack of books. It is enough to say that it got brutally violent, with torture and executions, and was finally ended by a vicious war, now known as the Thirty Years War. The terrorism and starvation partially depopulated northern Germany by its end in 1648. Catholicism didn’t yield power quietly, and the aftershocks of that fight persist to this day.

Now imagine yourself as a heterosexual Christian white man in 1947. Perhaps you are working in a unionized factory job or farming. Perhaps you are going to college on the GI Bill, preparing yourself for the white collar world. Whatever your path, your place is analogous to the peasant of 1516, in terms of your demographic identity. Desegregation is in the future. The heyday of the civil rights movement hasn’t arrived. Women’s rights aren’t a thing. Likewise LGBT rights, or even their existence. Secularism is a fringe idea, and psychotherapy is for rich kooks. Like a fish not understanding water, your preeminence in American society isn’t something you even consider. It’s just the way things are."

Read the whole thing here - it's well worth your time, especially for the way it draws your attention away from the immediate fireworks of the ragtag army of MAGA chuds, their disturbingly hilarous mid-rampage selfies and their touching faith that their transgressions will be wiped clean by a personal pardon from The Donald. 

These people and their actions are just the symptoms of a deeper malaise, in particular the general powerlessness of voters of all persuasions in a nation where both major political parties have, to a greater or lesser extent, been captured by the money of oligarchs & corporate interests, to such an extent that they don't represent the people who vote for them (or those disillusioned people who don't vote, for that matter).