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-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).

 

Botany corner

I've just been having an idle flick through a copy of Complete Guide to British Wild Flowers by Paul Sterry and I'm here to remind you that common plant names are wild. You probably know that already (Love Lies Bleeding, Fat Hen, Deadly Nightshade, etc), but there are so many more:

Weasel's Snout

Yellow Archangel

Bastard Balm

Enchanter's Nightshade

Frogbit

Wayfaring-tree

Devil's Bit Scabious

Mind-your-own-business 

There's a lovely folklore/fantasy vibe going on here and none of these names would be out of place in a Tolkien/Prachett-style fantasy world. I particuarly like Melancholy Thistle (Eeyore's thistle of choice), Sticky Mouse-ear (another job for Supervet) Petty Spurge (really needs to get a sense of proprtion) and Toad Rush (OK, obviously a reed, but also probably a classic Sega video game).

Sterry's book is about flowers, not fungi, but don't even get me started on popular fungus names - the Destroying Angel alone is metal enough to tell you that there are some fungi you really, really don't want to mess with.

Pro-Brexit voters knew what they were voting for...

...well, sort of.

Like many Remainers, I don't think that many pro-leave voters really knew what the consequences of a Leave vote in the 2016 European Union Referendum would be. But I do think that there's a sense in which they did know what they were voting for.

Leave's strategy of microtargeting many different types of voters with diverse, and often contradictory, concerns, meant that a lot of people did know what they were voting for. People who were targeted with messages abut the (bogus) extra £350 million for the NHS, probably voted for that. Those who thought that migration was the cause of their lives getting worse probably voted based on messages alleging that the UK had open borders, which it could "take back control" of if we left, or that Turkey would imminently be joining the EU, with millions of migrants about to arrive at Dover unless the UK voted out.

I'm not sure how they managed to filter down to the level of people who believed press myths about the EU unilaterally imposing lots of absurd and onerous rules on the UK, although I guess that their data gurus had ways of finding out who was sharing content from the Mail, Express or Telegraph web sites. Hell, they even had messages targeted at environmentalists and animal lovers, pretending that leaving the EU would, in some way, help to save polar bears.

So I'm sure that lots of people, on an individual level, knew what they were voting for. What they didn't know is that other people were voting for different, often incompatible things, all of projected on to the deliberately vague concept of Leave

The other thing they didn't know was that the people who were inducing them to vote for everything from more nurses to more polar bears had zero intention of delivering these things. The real reasons behind the campaign to leave were never shared with voters, from retaining secrecy around money hidden in offshore tax havens, to stripping voters of their workplace rights, freedom of movement, protection from dangerous products and access to free health care. All for the benefit of the super rich and the profits of unaccountable, predatory corporations.

It's a point that Remain campaigners should bear in mind - the "you didn't know what you were voting for" message might be counter-productive for people who responded directly to a simple targeted message. Reduced to this short, simple form, it sounds very much like "you were just stupid", which is never going to win hearts and minds.

In short, don't focus on what Leave voters didn't know, but focus on the promises that Leave politicians and cheerleaders broke, and keep on breaking.

"Oh, won't somebody PLEASE think of the polar bears?"

"Destination community wet"

No - me neither. Sounds more like random output from AI Weirdness or Botnik than something written by an actual human. It's getting hard to tell these days, as Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness pointed out recently:

These "I forced a bot to watch X" posts are almost certainly 100% human-written with no bot involved. Here's how you can tell. 1/12 https://t.co/4wVxfraqZS

— Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) June 14, 2018

When you find yourself wondering whether what you just read was written by a bot or just by a human pretending to be a bot pretending to be a human, maybe it's time to give up and go to the pub. If so, the Dolphin's OK and no wetter than the average pub, despite what it says on the brewery's web site.

Dilbert and Hyde

The hideous transformation of Scott Adams from rational human with a dry, mordant, deadpan sense of humour into crazed right-wing outrage monster is almost complete.

In episode 87 of his podcast, "Roseanne’s Ambien Defense", he goes full Alex Jones:

• "Sanofi took a despicable position on the matter 
• Sanofi blamed the likely VICTIM* of their drug"

Looks like Scott's been frying his brains with something way stronger than Ambien lately. At least, I hope that's the explanation. I'd hate to think he suffers from these disturbing fever dreams without being out of his tree on something seriously powerful.

*The screaming tabloid caps are, as Scott would say, a "tell", although I'm not 100% sure what they're a tell of. Maybe of uncontrollable inner rage, maybe of a wannabe troll trying to raise the emotional temperature in order to get a bite.

He boasts about being a master of persuasion and routinely accuses others of making "outrageist" statements while doing the same thing himself, in what looks like a deliberate attempt to create cognitive dissonance, so I assume there's at least some element of method in his madness. Not that  there's much difference between somebody who really is a frothing loon and somebody who genuinely thinks that a clever way to persuade other people is by pretending to be a frothing loon...

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

The absent fathers of Brexit

So the blame-shifting begins: "Daniel Hannan has noticed that Brexit isn’t going well. And he’s blaming Remainers", while Dominic Cummings has written "a letter to Tory MPs & donors on the Brexit shambles." The headlines are new, but the failure to take resposibility is old and familiar.

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, JFK said "victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan."

Go back a bit further, to 1941, and Count Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, was saying something which sounded equally proverbial: "As always, victory will have a hundred fathers, but defeat will never be acknowledged by anyone at all."

Even further back, at the end of the First Century AD, Tacitus said "This is an unfair thing about war: victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone." (Agricola 27:1)

"Gammon": not racist, just a bit rubbish

There's been a tweetstorm in a teacup over the word "gammon", used as shorthand for angry, red-faced right-wingers. Because black or brown people can't go red in the face, some people have been quick to call this anti-white racism. Personally, I'm more convinced by the people who just roll their eyes at the idea of angry white guys as an oppressed minority.

Dubious claims of racism aside, I don't like the term. I don't mind the comparison in context ("a furious middle-aged man with a face like gammon") although, like all similes and metaphors, this one will quickly get tired with over-use. But when you start using "gammon" as shorthand for a certain type of person, you're already talking to, and about, people in a private language. And, from the outside, private languages can sound very silly.

For example, look at the bizarre private language being used by various subgroups on the political right these days: snowflake, feminazi, RINO, cuck, remoaner, libtard, EUSSR, Chad, beta, SJW, virtue signalling, triggered, red pill, incel, normie, femoid, postmodern neo-Marxism...

This sort of shared jargon is mostly restricted to hardcore cranks and fanatics. Almost nobody you meet in everyday life uses that sort of language. It doesn't reach out and change minds. It's so niche that even the insults don't hurt. If "SJW" is the worst thing you can think of to call somebody, you definitely need some better trash talk.

And that's the danger with "gammon." Insulting somebody with an in-joke only that you and your mates get doesn't win arguments, or persuade people. It just makes you look a bit weird.

Look again at the right. When they talk in their own private jargon, they just sound like a bunch of sad oddballs. They only succeed and go mainstream when they use the same words as the rest of us - like "Make America great again" "and "Take back control." Using everyday language seems to be far more effective than making up your own terms and hoping they'll gain traction (they mostly don't).

Trending now

Well, here's a thing. I happened to be hunting the mot juste, using an online thesaurus, when I noticed which words are trending now:

"Lowlife", "kakistocracy", "slimeball", "salacious", "oligarch." There's your zeitgeist, right there.

Obscure trivia, pedantry and cake...

... are a few of my favourite things, so if course I was going to enjoy Simon Whistler's video on the history of the phrase "having your cake and eating it." My favourite piece of trivia was the fascinating detail that The Unabomber's pedantic habit of turning this phrase around so that it made more sense was one of the linguistic clues that finally revealed his true identity. If these are your sort of things too, help yourself to a slice...

Ears of corn

"We must also recognise there are real economic reasons why people have played up the issue of the Irish border and the need to have the shibboleth of the Good Friday Agreement."

Labour politician Barry Gardiner being just plain wrong about the Good Friday Agreement. A shibboleth, you'll recall, is a social marker which distinguishes members of an ingroup from members an outgroup:

...the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;
Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

Judges 12

The only function of the shibboleth is to distinguish between groups. The word's intrinsic, specific meaning is unimportant ("The term originates from the Hebrew word shibbólet (שִׁבֹּלֶת‬), which literally means the part of a plant containing grains, such as an ear of corn or a stalk of grain or, in different contexts, "stream, torrent").

The intrinsic, specific meaning of The Good Friday Agreement, in contrast, matters. The Republic of Ireland amended its constitution to remove its territorial claims to the whole island of Ireland. The United Kingdom ended direct rule in Northern Ireland. New agreements were made between Ireland and the UK and between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Watchtowers and border posts came down. People mostly stopped killing one another.

A daft quibble about cereal pronunciation it wasn't.

But Gardiner's use of the word did get me thinking about actual shibboleths. Not only was Gardiner wrong about the Good Friday Agreement itself, which was not a shibboleth, but the Good Friday Agreement precisely destroyed the power of shibboleths that had previously divided Irish people on both sides of the border:

In the BBC documentary series Who Do You Think You Are?, for instance, Graham Norton describes fraught childhood visits to his grandmother’s Belfast home:

I remember once my father got lost [in the Sandy Road area] and we were walking around, and I’d be gabbling on and my father was like, “shut up! Shut up!” Because if anyone heard our voices, you know, we spoke with a southern accent, it would have been trouble.

Dialect blog.

The Good Friday Agreement was all about getting rid of barriers and shibboleths. The global Trumpists, the Brexiteers and the alt-right are all about putting up walls, taking back control of our borders, sorting folk into "them" and "us", taking something as unimportant as skin colour or birthplace and turning it into a shibboleth.

For a long time I didn't understand why these sort of people kept on using this weird stereotypical vocabulary that you never ever hear ordinary folk using in everyday life - "snowflake", "SJW", "cuck", and so on. It doesn't make sense if you assume that these individuals are using language to communicate with others outside their own group. It makes perfect sense if you assume that these words are shibboleths, being used to self-identify as part of the ingroup.

One of the zeitgeisty books of the noughties was a hatchet job on business bullshit titled Why Business People Speak Like Idiots. Clearly there's a gap it today's market for a book called Why The Alt-Right Speak Like Idiots (tl;dr answer: because shibboleths).

Chocolate teapots and other useful things

1. It was as useful as a chocolate teapot. That is to say, children loved it, and crowded around asking for another; and it might just have saved the life of someone who was starving.

2. It went down like a lead balloon. Which is to say: it was designed to go down, and did so very successfully; and unlike the other balloons it was able to go into the deep ocean and explore there, perhaps holding a fragile crew within its compass to take notes.

Unlike raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, these have never appeared on anybody's list of favourite things, at least until they were reimagined at Listing to Port. See here for another six rehabilitated things to go with your chocolate teapot and lead balloon.

"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:

"We have heard rumblings"

It's not my place to tell other people how to do their jobs, but what the hell. Here's a template for schools, showing how not to communicate with parents:

"Re: staffing for next year. All staff are fully qualified and experienced teachers who we check carefully. We have heard rumblings from parents who may have concerns. Please come and speak to Mrs [redacted] so you can be reassured. No negative comments on here please. We always endeavour to listen and work with you. Thank you [redacted]."

"Why don't we just put any information that parents might need to hear in one place, on the school website?"

"Because we're down with the kids; we're all about social media, sharing and interactivity! Let's create a Facebook group and use that to keep in touch with parents! They'll love it! They can tell us how great we are, share cute photos and everything!"

"But what about parents who don't do Facebook?"

"La, la, la, not listening!"

"And if you invite people to interact, doesn't that create a systemic risk of people sharing things you'd prefer they spoke privately to staff about? Isn't the result just curated, fake interactivity, that pretends to welcome sharing and feedback, but patronises parents like naughty five year olds if they say anything that isn't positive?"

"BORING!!!"

For the record, I haven't used Facebook in about a decade and don't know the specifics of what the parents in question had been "rumbling" about. I just think the whole set-up is asking for trouble, as well as being annoying to non-Facebook users like me.

People shouldn't need a Facebook account in order to do important things like keeping in touch with their children's schools.

Dogs and canaries

The "canary in the coal mine" is a tired old phrase, but it describes something that was real. Although it's a long, long time since caged birds represented the cutting edge of mine safety equipment, the metaphor itself still makes sense. A gassed bird falling off its perch was an early warning of danger. That was a real thing that happened. But you can't really say the same for another clichéd animal metaphor, the one about this being a dog-eat-dog world. I mean, seriously?

Life is dog-eat-dog. Business is dog-eat-dog. Society apparently, is dog-eat-dog and of course the workplace, well, that’s dog-eat-dog. But here’s a question: When was the last time you saw a dog, eating a dog? Dogs, like humans, are social, pack animals that are predisposed to cooperation, but a certain type of indoctrination has led humans to the cynical belief that we are hardwired to cannibalise each other in a vain attempt to gain an advantage.

It's not that a dog would never eat another dog, but it's not the sort of thing that normally happens. If you see a documentary about a pack of wild dogs, the pack will probably be working together to hunt down other animals. If they start eating one another, you know something has gone very wrong (like an extreme drought wiping out most of the dogs' prey, leaving the starving predators with nothing to eat but each other).

A literal dog-eat-dog world isn't a thing, or at least not a normal one. It's more like a doggie dystopia, an extreme aberration that might happen in the aftermath of some terrible catastrophe.

If you catch someone claiming that it's a dog-eat-dog world, the phrase should put you on alert (like a canary dropping off its perch) that something's gone badly wrong, either with the situation, or with the speaker's assessment of the situation:

They survived by eating their dead. This probably shouldn't be your go-to example of standard human resources practice, or an acceptable metaphor for how a properly functioning organisation, or society, should look.

Of course, in most "dog-eat-dog worlds", people don't actually get as far as eating one another. The zero-sum war of all against all is fought over jobs, promotions, resources and status. But it's still a poor metaphor and a poorer philosophy of life. We don't yet live in a post-apocalyptic society, not that you'd know it from the abnormal behaviour of the people who fought like rats in a sack to secure a few reasonably-priced jars of branded chocolate spread in the Great Nutella Riots of 2018.

It truly was a dog-eat-dog world to the people elbowing one another aside to pillage the last sticky treats from the shelves of the Intermarché supermarket chain, but that wasn't because the people involved were clear-eyed pragmatists who'd leaned some tough lessons, courtesy of the University of Life. It was because they were idiots who needed to calm down and get a grip.

I'll say it again - if you think it's a dog-eat-dog world, there's something wrong either with your world, or with you.

.

The seigneur of sark

I just wrote a slightly sarky post about Ukip's current leadership difficulties, but I'm just an amateur, only in it for the LOLs, and to let off steam. Matthew Norman, though, gets paid for writing this stuff and it shows in the superior quality of his sarcasm. Watch and learn as he fillets those Kippers like a Michelin-starred chef:

"The never-ending saga of the Ukip leadership continues with 'anti-far right' Henry Bolton in a pickle after his girlfriend turned out to be a bit racist

...In the most shocking political development since the last time Theresa May insisted she has been “very clear” about some piece of incomprehensibly opaque drivel, Ukip is on the verge of needing a new leader.

Certainly, the incumbent has earned a rest after a marathon stint. It’s almost three and a half months since Henry Bolton, a blazer-clad ex-copper, assumed the mantle...

...If and when Bolton departs to create another vacancy, he can leave feeling satisfied about a job well done. Running as a virtual unknown, he won by highlighting his enmity to all forms of extremism, but especially the “infiltration” of Ukip by the far right.

Since exposing racism under deep cover was his goal, here’s one political career that will not end in failure. Thanks to Bolton, a Ukip member has been suspended for racism of sufficient blatancy to earn an invitation to serve at the pleasure of the US President.

If there is a down side to his triumph, it feels almost too trivial to mention. But the suspended member is Bolton’s girlfriend, Jo Marney. Or his “mistress” as the Mail on Sunday quaintly prefers it when splashing today with her trenchant thoughts on Meghan Markle and matters of race.

For the record, the 54-year-old Bolton left his wife Tatiana for Marney, estimates of whose age vary from 25 to 29, just before Christmas. While that is a particularly cruel time for the mother of two tiny children to learn of her replacement by a much younger woman, at least Bolton broke the news with the chivalrous sensitivity expected of the holder of his office. He ended the marriage by text.

...After [Marney] launched a recent Facebook exchange with “I wouldn’t with a negro”, her correspondent’s “What’s wrong with black people?” allowed her to illustrate a gift for brevity. “Ugly,” she wrote, before segueing into a staccato riff on the approaching nuptials. “Harry’s marrying. God! Wet as a scrubber. Awful. A royal yank. Yuk.”

She then assuaged fears that her objections lay in Markle’s nationality, though not without raising fresh concerns about her understanding of reproductive biology. Markle’s “seed”, she wrote, will “taint our royal family … Tiny brain. She’s black. A dumb little ‘actress’ that no one has heard of.”

There may be the germ of an irony in that last remark. Marney describes herself as an “actress”, but without apparently having starred in seven seasons of Suits, or in fact having a credited in any production at all. Among the other careers she lists on Twitter are “music journalist”, “presenter” and “model”. The evidence available supports solely the latter, and only then in the sub-category of modelling prefixed by “glamour”.


Anyway, as the Socratic dialogue drew to its close on Facebook, Marney maintained her pithy form with: “Just don’t like her. She’s a black American … Next will be a Muslim PM. And a black king.”

...It is quite possible, after all, that Bolton, who was elected after warning that the wrong leader risked Ukip becoming the “UK Nazi party”, knew nothing of her opinions until today’s papers...

...While wishing him well in his next endeavour, it is probably too early to speculate about which of Ukip’s countless other anti-racism warriors will inherit the crown. One assumes Farage will be driven by near-poverty and that minor addiction to the spotlight to launch another positively final comeback tour...

...In the meantime, the thoughts turn to David Cameron. It was to neutralise the terrible menace of Ukip that he called his kamikaze referendum on EU membership. How he must surge with pride whenever he beholds the awesome might of the enemy he was prepared to sacrifice his country to defeat."

Savour the whole thing in its sarcastic magnificence here.

The special relationship

Racist pillock who called Africans "piccaninnies" with "watermelon smiles" supports racist pillock who called African countries "shitholes."

The USA and the UK. Two countries divided by a common outrage.

"Jonathan, our second eldest, suddenly became a flute."

The family round robin letter is one of those alleged seasonal treats, like Brussels sprouts and Christmas pud, that's generally consumed out of duty, rather than for pleasure.* Except for Botnik's Holiday Update "To our wonderful friends and Bob", which is a thing of beauty and a joy for ever. Enjoy.



*I quite like sprouts, but then I'm weird like that (I don't even object to Christmas pud that much, although a little bit goes a long way).

Democracy's poster boy

Back in 2002, David Davis was all for keeping the electorate well-informed, so that political decisions were implemented with informed consent:

"Referendums should be held when the electorate are in the best possible position to make a judgement. They should be held when people can view all the arguments for and against and when those arguments have been rigorously tested. In short, referendums should be held when people know exactly what they are getting. So legislation should be debated by Members of Parliament on the Floor of the House, and then put to the electorate for the voters to judge.

We should not ask people to vote on a blank sheet of paper and tell them to trust us to fill in the details afterwards. For referendums to be fair and compatible with our parliamentary process, we need the electors to be as well informed as possible and to know exactly what they are voting for. Referendums need to be treated as an addition to the parliamentary process, not as a substitute for it." [my bold]

By 2017, not only is Dave cool with lying to voters and Parliament about what the executive's been getting up to but, never mind the electorate, it's apparently fine for even the executive to be ill-informed about the issues:

"What's the requirement of my job? I don't have to be very clever, I don't have to know that much, I do just have to be calm..." [my bold]

Fifteen years ago, he was a persuasive advocate for participatory democracy. Today, a "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster could do most of his job, apart from the lying.

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