One of these things is not Orwellian

"Orwellian" has become one of the most over-used expressions in the English language (or Oldspeak, as we still don't call it more than three decades after 1984). To give just one ridiculous example, Tommy Robinson, former leader of the English Defence League has just been jailed for contempt of court, after he continued to make broadcasts on social media which could have prejudiced an ongoing court case, despite being told to stop it.

Cue a flurry of Tweets calling his trial and conviction "Orwellian." Which is, of course, very silly. Rules to make trials as fair and impartial as possible would have had no place in Orwell's satire of an unfair, arbitrary society where  rule by the most powerful has replaced the rule of law.

Also, Orwell went to Spain to shoot people like Tommy Robinson in the head, as somebody less silly just pointed out on Twitter.

In contrast, here's what "Orwellian" really looks like:

“Since the school has introduced these cameras, it is like there are a pair of mystery eyes constantly watching me, and I don’t dare let my mind wander.”

... said an unnamed student in a Chinese high school, which recently introduced facial recognition technology to monitor students’ attentiveness in class.

Winston turned around abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen.

1984

Empire of the sun 2.0

Here's the full text of the recent extraordinary communication from Dominic Cummings, former campaign director of Vote Leave.

Dear Tory MPs and donors

After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in our empire today, We have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure.

We have ordered our government to communicate to the European Union that our Empire 2.0 accepts the provisions of their joint declaration.

To strive for the common prosperity and happiness of all nations as well as the security and well-being of our subjects is the solemn obligation which has been handed down by our imperial ancestors and which lies close to our heart.

Indeed, we declared war on Europe out of our sincere desire to ensure the UK's self-preservation and the stabilisation of Europe, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandisement.

Despite the best that has been done by everyone – the gallant fighting of Vote Leave, Leave.EU and Ukip, the diligence and assiduity of Her Majesty's government, and the devoted service of our seventeen million supporters – the Brexit situation has developed not necessarily to the UK's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.

Beware most strictly of any outbursts of emotion which may engender needless complications, or any fraternal contention and strife which may create confusion, lead you astray and cause you to lose the confidence of the world.

Let the entire nation continue as one family from generation to generation, ever firm in its faith in the imperishability of its sacred land, and mindful of its heavy burden of responsibility, and of the long road before it.

Unite your total strength, to be devoted to construction for the future. Cultivate the ways of rectitude, foster nobility of spirit, and work with resolution – so that you may enhance the innate glory of the imperial state and keep pace with the progress of the world.

Best wishes

Dominic Cummings

Former God Emperor of Vote Leave

Any resemblance to the surrender broadcast made by His Imperial Majesty Emperor Hirohito is purely coincidental.

Free speech on campus update

With apologies to Maajid Nawaz and LBC news:

Snarky McSnarkface: Why I Refuse To Use Special Forms of Address For Qualified People 

Doctor Snarky Mc Snarkface, professor of sarcasm at the University of Toronto, told LBC he is refusing to let the university tell him what he can and can't say.

The authorities at his university have requested that he stops publicly referring to his colleague, Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology, as "crazy lobster guy", and are insisting that he uses more politically correct forms of academic address.

And Dr Mc Snarkface, who has shot to prominence in recent months, says it is not the university's role to control what language he uses.

Speaking to Maajid Nawaz, he said: "There are these prescriptive forms of language being used to hypothetically describe this crazy lobster guy, who is apparently "entitled" to be addressed as ‘Doctor’ or 'Professor', something I don't understand conceptually.

"A person is now compelled by the university authorities to refrain from deliberately insulting colleagues, even the obvious kooks, on pain of dismissal.

"And I thought, no that's not acceptable.

"It's one thing to put limits on what a person can't say, like in hate speech laws, which I also don't agree with.

"But to compel me to use a certain content when I'm formulating my thoughts or my actions under threat of dismissal, I thought no, the university has introduced compelled speech into the academic sphere. Basic civility has never happened before in the history of academia, so I said there's no way I'm abiding by that.

"I don't care what you're damned rationale is. 'We're being civil'. No you're not. You're playing this entitled, censorious academic game. You're trying to gain linguistic supremacy in the area of academic discourse.

"You're doing this by using good manners as a guise and you're not going to do it with me."

They can take our lobsters, but they will never take our FREEDOM!

A special nation, just like all the others

"Just after the referendum someone predicted that the brexit negotiations would be a process of 'controlled capitulation'. Which has come to pass. At least our egregious sense of national exceptionalism is being nailed ever deeper into the cross of astounded leaver righteousness."

Perhaps the most egregious thing about the United Kingdom's sense of national exceptionalism is that it's almost exactly like everybody else's sense of national exceptionalism. This, for example, is what "taking back control" looks like in Viktor Orbán's Hungary:

A few weeks ago, in a small town in Hungary, two Catholic nuns were stopped on the street and berated by people yelling, “Migrants! Migrants!” After pushing the old ladies a bit, they called the police, believing they had seen Muslim women in a burqa and hijab. The police saved the nuns from the Christian crowd.

Those eejits might have been wearing the Magyar version of the MAGA hat but, from the UK, this sort of thing  looks depressingly familiar. Remember this story from 2014?

Nigel Farage’s local Ukip branch has rebuked the BBC for its ingrained liberal bias in holding a straw poll on the party leader in front of a London mosque. The mosque in question was Westminster Cathedral...

...This isn’t the first-time a rightwing party has got its buildings confused. The English Defence League mistook Brighton’s Royal Pavilion for a mosque last year.

Different flag, same stupid.

Lose that flag and other people's national exceptionalism starts to look a whole lot like our own:

The Orbán government’s first legislative move is the Stop Soros Act, which will force human rights groups to register as foreign agents and submit to regular police surveillance, fiduciary controls, and punitive taxes. Groups that have absolutely nothing to do with immigration — those looking after Hungarian citizens’ human rights, advocating education and prison reform, representing the homeless and ethnic and religious minorities, etc. — will be persecuted [Brits may not be able to get a decent cup of tea on the Continent, but at they'll at least have enough of a "hostile environment" to make them feel right at home]...

...Orbán’s semi-dictatorship ... unlike its post-Stalinist predecessor, is not statist or centralizing. Its guiding principles are arbitrary, capricious rule and, above all, informality. The real centers of power in Orbán’s Hungary are formally independent institutions (state foundations, semi-private companies, purportedly private firms living on state credit) that are outside the control of normal government administration and of judicial control as well [in the UK, think how policy is shaped by a shady spider's web of obscure, unaccountable interest groups - the Legatum Institute, the European Research Group, the TaxPayers' Alliance, Migration Watch, the Adam Smith Institute...]. Meanwhile, regular administration is being dismantled and well-trained civil servants are being thrown out in droves ["Brexit minister fuels conspiracy about 'rogue' civil servants"] . Drafting of bills happens behind the backs of ostensibly leading politicians and bureaucrats, and rushed through parliament [Henry VIII clauses, anybody?] — usually without discussion.

There's nothing special and unique about people insisting that they're special and unique.

Rees-Mogg invites Cadet Bone Spurs to visit war zone

Donald Trump should get the "reddest of red carpets", says Jacob Rees-Mogg. Of course he'd get one - we don't have guns, we have knives, so there's blood all over the floor of the House of Commons. It's like a war zone in there, I tell you. That wouldn't frighten The Donald, who'd probably rush in there, even without a weapon, if only it wasn't for those pesky bone spurs.

Pestilence unpopular with public, apparently

When I wrote this, I wasn't asking a serious question, just being sarcastic:

These people [Brexiteers] have really taken the "never waste a good crisis" idea and run with it. I wonder how long it's going to be before one of them comes out as pro-global pandemic, given the widespread historical view that the Black Death gave medieval society the biggest stimulus to get its butt in gear that it had ever had?

But, once again, I fought Poe's Law and the law won. So, just under two years after I wrote this, Paul Oakley, Ukip’s general secretary, said this:

"Think of the Black Death in the Middle Ages. It comes along and it causes disruption and then it goes dormant, and that’s exactly what we are going to do. Our time isn’t finished because Brexit is being betrayed." 

Bless Oakley, he's even gone one better than me - not just "We love the plague" but "We are the plague." Which invites the obvious thought that voters should probably avoid them like the plague. Oh look, they just did. Like they did last year.

There's dancing in the streets as the people of the UK prepare to exit the European Union and celebrate their Independence Day...

Europe to blame for Windrush scandal, claims cretin

This might sound rude, but that impeccably well-bred gentleman, Jacob Rees-Mogg, has just confirmed that it is perfectly acceptable to describe political views with which one disagrees as "cretinous." O tempora o mores!

Sarcasm aside, I don't mind people like Rees-Mogg saying stuff that's silly (or "cretinous", if you want to answer abuse with abuse). What annoys me is seeing the media treat his nonsense like holy writ ("It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of Mogg"). As somebody just said, in a slightly different context:

"This is the part of ... inequality ... that doesn't get talked about enough. One percenters ... aren't necessarily more prone to stupid ideas than the rest of us, but when they have stupid ideas, their enormous power shakes the world."

Howl and Boo

Since February, we've known that the United Kingdom's government knows that any plausible version of Brexit will almost certainly make the UK poorer, not richer (tl;dr graphic version here).

On the face of it, that was a big deal and a strong argument for having another vote to check whether the people of the UK really want to be poorer. However, the Express's headline writers, having had two months to produce a watertight counter-argument, have come up with, not one, but two (count 'em!) irrefutable arguments against thinking twice about this whole thing:

"Question Time audience HOWL and BOO commentator for advocating second Brexit referendum"

To me, Howl and Boo sound great as names for a pair of children's cartoon characters, maybe not so great as conclusive arguments for leaving the largest free trade area on the planet, but what do I know?

Arron Banks, the wealthy donor partly responsible for the Brexit campaign, explained leave’s media strategy thus: “The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally."

Maybe, with Howl and Boo, we've reached the logical conclusion of Banksy's campaign to lobotomise political argument, all the better to connect with unthinking gut instinct which, as any fule kno, is all you need to make good decisions about the future of international trade, tariffs and customs unions.

But, then again, over the last couple of years, whenever I've imagined that the level of policical debate has definitely reached rock bottom, some twit has whipped out a stonking great diamond-tipped drill and bored down a bit further into the bedrock. Howl and boo too complicated for you? Coming soon to a headline near you: "Audience members GRUNT and HOWL at smelly Remoaners."

Oh well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. All together now:

"All the little pigs, they grunt and howl
The cats mee-yow
The dogs bow-wow
Everybody makes a row
Down on Jollity Farm..."

"...Everything's a perfect treat
Down on Jollity Farm..."

The respect he deserves

Here's the United Kindom's excuse for a foreign secretary, showing how to suck up to a racist, authoritarian anti-Semitic bully:

Congratulations to Fidesz and Viktor Orban on winning the elections in Hungary. We look forward to working with our Hungarian friends to further develop our close partnership. #UKandHungary

— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) 9 April 2018

And here's Jean-Claude Juncker demostrating the correct diplomatic protocol:


Well played, Jean-Claude. If you need a list of other people overdue for a bit of disrespect and a good slap, I've got a few names here. The list, of course, starts with Boris:

The foreign secretary joins Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, Matteo Salvini, Beatrix von Storch, Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini in sending his congratulations to Viktor Orban. https://t.co/vw0Jgxh6FQ

— Peter Foster (@pmdfoster) 9 April 2018

A spotter's guide to Caucasian wingnuts

"From pollination to the Caucasian wingnut's first released seed you could have taken 28,478,544 steps." Message set into a paving stone outside the Network Rail building, Milton Keynes.

The Caucasian wingnut (AKA the Caucasian walnut), Pterocarya fraxinifolia, is a deciduous tree, native to the Caucasus/Iran region. Apparently, it can grow up to 20m high, bears small green winged nutlets and its dark wood is often used in veneers, so it can't, unlike certain other Caucasian wingnuts I could mention, be accused of being neither use nor ornament.

Fraudian slip?

"FRAUD WARNING: Exploiting BREXIT among top ways scammers will cheat people out of money", caution the Express's headline writers.

Whether the headline is symptomatic of severe irony deficiency, or just a rare lucid insight, the fortuitous pairing of Brexit and fraud is probably not the best look for the Europhobic press to be wearing right now.*

Whatever the reason, I find myself in the rare position of endorsing an Express headline. Being gullible enough to believe the people who sold the nation Brexit probably is a fair predictor of susceptibility to scammers.



* Update - although, as our learned friend points out, mere electoral fraud wouldn't invalidate the result, at least legally speaking. But it would certainly undermine the political legitimacy of the failing Brexit project.

"Nudge, nudge, wink, wink..."

Let's run with that unstated assumption that "those ‘choice architects’ claiming that they know what is best for society and individual citizens are exempt from that theory [i.e. nudge theory]."

Nudgers are, by definition, more powerful than the people they nudge, and more powerful generally means richer. If the poor are nudged, for their own good, does that mean that everything is now OK, because their self-evidently superior betters can be trusted to act rationally and reasonably at all times? How's rule by enlightened plutocrats working out?

Then there's the outsized role that rich peoples' irrational prejudices play in the policy sphere: whether that's Wahabism and its systematic oppression of women, or American hydrocarbon barons' climate denial, Mike Pence's Dominionism, Gwyenth Paltrow's multi-million-dollar science-denial business, Putin's violent aggression against anyone who criticizes the Russian Orthodox church, or Prince Charles's absurd belief in homeopathy. When the richest of the rich can swing policy outcomes just by insisting that they're right and everyone else is wrong, evidence is unceremoniously dumped and we all have to survive the shear where uncaring reality meets uncompromising ideology.

It's worse than that, actually, because when the shear occurs, the rich don't just admit they were wrong and move on. They jail people who point out their mistakes, get their paid-for lawmakers to defund research into their pet theories, and deny, deny, deny, until the seas rise and measles kill our kids.

Cory Doctorow

Either that, or they're wittering on about the urgent need to create a massive network of enormous pneumatic tubes, so people can travel in individual pods, because if you catch a bus, like normal people, you just might end up sitting next to a serial killer. Or falling for quacks who promise them eternal youth if they inject their ageing bodies with young peoples' blood.

It's almost as if unchecked inequality, which lets the irresponsible whims of the few trump the interests of the many, is more of a problem than the alleged fecklessness of the poor.

"...say no more!"

Boris and Vlad's PR agency

Is this what Mrs Mayday meant by a "red, white and blue Brexit"?

Both Sanni and Wylie have also confirmed that the harvested information has been shared with Kremlin linked entities.

These could include the Internet Research Agency troll farm in St Petersburg, accused by Robert Mueller and the US Supreme Court of manipulating the Trump vote in the US.

With a budget of approximately $1.25 million, the Internet Research Agency is mostly funded by Oligarch Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, linked to the three state run TV networks in Russia and known by the Russian media as “Putin’s Chef.”

Prighozin, who held clandestine meetings with Robert Mercer in the Virgin Islands during the Trump Presidential Campaign, also has a major interest in Wagner Group, the corporate mercenary army implicated in war crimes in Donbas, Crimea and Syria.

Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned, together with his daughter Yulia and a British policeman, in Salisbury this month using a deadly nerve agent developed by the Russian military.

A source close to Skripal has said he was investigating the collusion between the Internet Research Agency, AIQ, Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL.

Roger Cottrell.

Having already photoshopped an image of Corbyn onto a red Kremlin background and - purely fortuitously - softened the outline of his cap to make it look like a fur hat, I presume that the BBC, in the interests of balance, will now be giving Boris, the Vote Leave Commissar, a similar Russia-themed graphic makeover?

What d'you mean "Nyet"?

Hmmm ... It's almost as if the British establishment will let a chap get away with almost anything, so long as he attended Eton or Marlborough.

Ukip death clock update

On March 16th, the crowdfunding site set up to raise £100,000 to "save Ukip" had raised just £610. By March 25th this had gone up to £620. Today, with UK local elections just a month away and a leadership election due before the end of May, they've raised:

Yep, it's still £620.

You might call this a crowdfunding page.

I call it the Ukip death clock.

Money troubles

One good reason for not entrusting the future of the country to the people who think leaving the European Union will solve everything, is that those people look rubbish at handling money. First, if we're to believe the latest allegations, Vote Leave had more wonga than it could legally use, so breached electoral law by laundering its spending via a tiny unofficial campaign run by a 23 year old fashion student.

In contrast, the people who started this whole sorry business, Ukip, are so short of money that they've been reduced to a crowdfunding campaign to keep the clown car on the road. They apparently need £100,000 "to save Ukip whilst it restructures its position." Last week they'd raised just £610 of that figure. This week they're up to ...

... £620. At this rate, by my reckoning, they'll have raised enough money to save the UK branch of the Vladimir Putin Appreciation Society in about 190 years.

Admittedly the party's youth wing, Young Independence, has taken a bit of time off from trying to organise rallies for failed neo-Nazis to cough up £2,000 towards the crisis appeal, but even with two grand from the Batten-Jugend, they're only up to two and a half percent of their target.

Fake news factory fooled fake intellectual with fake office

There's a rich vein of social comedy in the Cambridge Analytica affair. Here's how wily old Etonian cad, Alexander James Ashburner Nix, conned that gullible American pseudo-intellectual, Steve Bannon, by appealing to his philosopher king fantasies of dreaming spires and elite institutions:

So keen was the firm to impress Mr Bannon it opened a satellite office near the University of Cambridge after Mr Bannon expressed an interest in visiting the city.

"We created this fake office in Cambridge and brought a bunch of people to set up this office beside the university to make it look like 'This is our Cambridge site. Our Potemkin Cambridge office," Mr Wylie said.

"And later, when the Mercers bought in and they appointed Steve to set up the company, he decided he should call it Cambridge Analytica... as a tip of the hat to our deep links to the University of Cambridge. And so a false reality was infused into the name Cambridge Analytica."

It's not being fooled that hurts. It's being fooled by fools like this.

Afterthought - maybe Hobo Trump got fired because, for all Bannon's intellectual pretensions, his boss already knew more than he did about this kind of bullshit:

Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal describes a stunt in which he lured Holiday Inn executives into investing in an Atlantic City casino by directing his construction manager to rent dozens of pieces of heavy equipment, in advance of a visit by the executives, to move dirt around on the proposed casino site, creating the illusion that construction was underway.

The Register belts Cambridge Analytica with double whammy

1. Best headline: "ICO surprise Cambridge Analytica raid delayed: Nobody expects the information commissioner! Oh wait, yes they do"

2. Best response in the comments: "Anyone would think that the establishment are trying to give CA enough of a chance to clean their house* before they have a snoop around."

I'm sure that Arron Banks, who boasted about Leave.EU using CA, before changing his story and denying they'd ever used CA, will be following developments with interest...





*Update - of course, the process of Spring cleaning started waay before the ICO gave CA a head start, so they could get on with burying the remaining bodies...

Where can you go from there, Boris?

Boris Johnson has likened the way President Putin is promoting the World Cup in Russia to Hitler's notorious use of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

The foreign secretary said Labour MP Ian Austin was "completely right" to say Russia's president wanted to "gloss over [his] brutal corrupt regime".

A man with an expensive classical education like Boris should really have a wider range of historical precedents to draw on. But no, if your opponent is thuggish, repressive, undemocratic, there's apparently only ever one valid comparison. Hitler, Hitler, always bloody Hitler. But the thing is, once you've turned your rhetoric all the way up to Hitler, where do you go from there? Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel could have told him:

Nigel Tufnel: ...You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty DiBergi: I don't know.

Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly.*

And "Nowhere" is exactly these comparisons usually lead.

Anthony Eden wasn't afraid to talk the talk about Nasser being the new Hitler, but when it came to walking the walk ... well, let's just say that Suez wasn't exactly a replay of our finest hour. Then there was the drum beat to the Iraq War, when you were either with us or some kind of craven Munich-style appeaser. Surprise, surprise, it took more than overheated rhetoric and a dodgy dossier to liberate Iraq and victory, when it came, brought a settlement that was more Mad Max than Marshall Plan. And who can forget Boris's fellow ex-London mayor, Ken Livingstone, doubling down on his stupid comments about Hitler being a Zionist? That didn't exactly bring peace to the Middle East, or achieve anything, apart from indelibly staining Ken's reputation.

If you have to use the "H" word, save it for actual Nazis, like the sort of far-right Holocaust-denying cranks Putin's Russia has  been funding and supporting in its transparent, and relatively successful, efforts to destabilise Europe. That's about as close to a justified Putin-Hitler connection as you're going to get. Otherwise, Putin is just another one of the world's thuggish autocrats, in the same mould as Erdoğan, or the UK's best buddy, Prince Salman. They're all objectively horrible, but not in the same league as a mass murderer who gloried in killing tens of millions by war and genocide.

The more Hitler comparisons I hear, the more sympathy I have for the crudest version of Godwin's Law ("If you're the first one to mention Hitler, you lose").





*Of course, in Spinal Tap, they solved the problem of having nowhere higher than ten to go by painting the number "eleven" on the amp dial. I'm not quite sure how Boris could take it all the way up to eleven - maybe he could compare Putin to Darth Vader, who had a whole planet and its population blown up just for the evulz, which would sort of make him even worse than Hitler, if only he'd actually existed...

Never believe anything until it is officially denied

"Toxic nothingburger: Cambridge Analytica exposé is dangerous political attack posing as journalism" screams RT  (formerly Russia Today). "Apart from that, how did you enjoy your toxic nothingburger, Mr Skripal?"

"‘No Impact’: Cambridge Analytica Uproar Much Ado About Common Election Practices" insists Sputnik.

"THE Facebook data scandal is being wildly exaggerated for political ends." claims Pravda The Sun. .

"Taking back control of our borders" Humpty Dumpty style

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."

Apparently Humpty Dumpty and Chris Grayling have more in common than their shared resemblance to an egg:

The UK government is reportedly considering making Britain's borders completely open to the European Union after Brexit if it crashes out of negotiations with no deal in place...

...Transport Secretary Chis Grayling last night insisted there will be no additional checks on Britain's border no matter what form Brexit takes.

"We will maintain a free-flowing border at Dover, we will not impose checks at the port, it is utterly unrealistic to do so," the Brexit-voting Conservative minister told audience members.

"We don't check lorries now, we're not going to be checking lorries in the future."

They also both seem to live in Wonderland and appear to have been taking a few too many puffs of whatever it was that caterpillar was smoking: