Every day, British people are subjected to a firehose of advertising and propaganda. But when you survey everyone’s attitude, you always find something interesting.
Continue reading “How effective is propaganda?”
Spotting media bias, part one of many
Let’s talk about how to spot Media Bias, and thus avoid the derangement that is symptomatic of Media Damage.
The press use language in a particular way when they want to downplay something bad, and it’s all about tone of voice: The active voice speaks, the passive voice’s words are spoken. The active voice makes the person or thing who caused something explicit in the minds of the reader. The passive voice puts rhetorical distance between actor and action, in a way where you don’t even have to mention the actor.
This trick is occasionally very revealing. Let’s look at a recent example, coverage of violence at a rally a few days ago in America. Last year, something very bad happened in Portland, and it caused a lot of right-wing figures very concerned about free speech to want to assemble a year later to spread their message. For some reason, a certain group of people were opposed to this. Violence broke out and a local newspaper published an article on what happened.
Royal Wedding Post
The Royal Family in this country are now slightly less pale. The bride requested an African priest to give a benediction at the ceremony. I was talking with a friend today about how this is a big break from tradition, good and significant in its own right, but I have other friends have talked about this event in very negative terms, that having a black priest does a lot of whitewashing for an institution that once enslaved, raped and violated black people.
Both those views are right in their way, but I personally am closer to the latter, and where you fall depends I think on whether you believe actions speak louder than words.
Continue reading “Royal Wedding Post”
Free speech and debate with the far right
Recently a friend, in a conversation related to freedom of speech, spoke about how it was important to let all sides be heard and discussed no matter how obnoxious, even if you disagree with them, because that sharpens your own worldview and it means you’re not hypocritically dismissing someone without hearing their full arguments.
I got to thinking about this. Free speech and civil debate is a rallying cry for the alt-right and I feel it’s worth talking about what that means.
Continue reading “Free speech and debate with the far right”
Terrorism, Imperialism and “Permissible” forms of government
James Matthews, a British man who has fought against ISIS with the Syrian Democratic Forces has just been charged with terror offences by our government. He’s not done anything wrong in the two years he’s been back in the UK, and he was fighting on the side of progressive Syrian Muslims allied to the United States against some of the most sadistic and depraved enemies imaginable, but the home office is suddenly extremely concerned that he might have learned violent habits.
This stands in stark contrast to the treatment of Salman Abedi. This was a guy who Theresa May sent out of the county to fight alongside extremists in Libya, who were armed by the British Government after the fall of Gadaffi a few years back. When he’d finished helping his new friends set up their open air slave markets, he returned to the UK and despite five different community leaders and relatives contacting the police about his alarming behaviour, he was left to his own devices right up until he blew up over twenty people outside the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.
This isn’t an isolated case, either – it happens on an international scale. The latest chapter of the war in Syria is a dark one – with ISIS on the verge of defeat, president Erdogan of Turkey has shaved the beards off some of the jihadi fighters who fled across his border, and is now using them to invade Afrin in North Syria. These are people who, keeping their old habits, have released videos of them torturing, mutilating and beheading people they’ve captured, while openly announcing their intention to commit a genocide in the region and settle there. Their targets, on the other hand, were the guys that with the help of the United States drove ISIS from the country, have sheltered hundreds of thousands of refugees from the war in the south and were setting up a progressive, socialist and feminist regional government until they started getting bombed last month with the best weaponry NATO can buy.
Protests against this obviously illegal war of aggression are banned in Germany. Theresa May cannot send the Turks enough weapons, and when it was suggested to her that we condemn them for openly sponsoring ISIS 2.0, she pulled that grimace where she looks like someone stuffed a lemon up a dog’s asshole, and changed the subject. Trump and his friends have indicated that they’re going to abandon their former allies and allow Turkey to crush them. Why?
Don’t worry, friends, I’ll tell you fuckin’ why.
Continue reading “Terrorism, Imperialism and “Permissible” forms of government”
Betting
A little old lady in a woolly sweater shows up to the Trump Taj Mahal with approximately ten million dollars worth of chips. She plays conservatively on the craps table for a bit, but her massive stash attracts interest from the clientele, and The Donald himself descends the elevator and goes to talk to her.
“Well there, little old lady, I like how you have a lot of money! I’m an extremely rich man myself! Did you read my book on how to become extremely rich?”
“No Mr. President, I got it by betting.”
Trump is incredulous. “Folks, this girl cracks me up. You won ten million on craps?”
“No, I bet on people. Tell you what, I’ll make a bet right now. I bet you a hundred grand that in a week’s time your bollocks will be square.”
Trump glows. “I like your style, but more to the point, I cannot resist such a deal!” and he sticks out his hand. She shakes it with a wry look. “You may regret this, Mr. President.” Beaming, Trump ignores her and goes back up the elevator to boast to his son in law about his ability to spot an opportunity, and finish off the rest of his hamburgers.
An appointment is duly made and the next week, the lady and her solicitor ride the golden escalator to the top of Trump Tower. Trump is sitting at his golden desk and turns off the television as his guests are shown into his office.
“Well now, glad to see you again, you spicy minx! I see you’ve brought a witness, and he’s about to learn how I get a hundred thousand dollars richer!”
The lawyer raises an eyebrow as the woman’s frowns. “I don’t believe it,” she says gently.
“You’d better believe it!” blares Trump.
“No, I don’t. You’ll have to show me.”
Trump needs little encouragement. He marches to the other side of his desk, drops his trousers and belches as he bends over. The woman leans back and reaches out her arm, and after a second of rustling she says “Alright, fine. You win.”
“Folks, this is great!” says Trump as he stands back up, but a thumping noise distracts him and he turns to see the lawyer bashing his head against one of the golden pillars in Trump’s office. “Wow,” he says, “What’s with that guy?”
“Oh, I bet him a million dollars that in a week’s time I’d have Donald Trump by the balls.”
Destroy the computer brain machine
I’m a pretty well educated man, I think it’s fair to say; I like logic, and I like language. But the language of logic and reason, invented during the enlightenment to break through the arguments that kings had a divine right to rule as they wished, has now been fully subverted by the new ruling class. It can be used dishonestly while giving an impression that you are the reasonable one, it can be used to insult people while appearing polite, and it can be used to confuse conversations that involve arguments you don’t want to actually engage with. The consequences of this are all around us: it is used to justify wars of aggression designed to enrich our overlords and leave us in pieces on a foreign field, it is used to antagonize people and destroy solidarity, it disempowers people and maintains hierarchies in our society – a perfect reflection of what it was created to fight.
Continue reading “Destroy the computer brain machine”
Dealing with illness
A significant amount of modern psychology is a ploy to turn your attempts to adapt your human brain to an insane exploitative hellscape society, your inevitable failure and your subsequent misery and dysfunction into a personal problem that you can be judged or punished for by that same society.
If you’re struggling to navigate past a million blaring advertisements and inane pieces of drudgery to find something more important to you than selling your labour to a company owned by a distant cluster of monsters, you’ve got ADHD. If you have a tendency to get overwhelmed by the instability and uncertainty your feel every day at the mercy of gigantic organisations designed and operated by psychopaths, you’ve got anxiety disorder. If your boring work has no point beyond enriching some faceless billionaire a thousand miles away and all that’s left after its burned through your daily energy is despair, you’ve got depression.
With each of these labels comes stigma, and a medical treatment (produced and sold to profit the same corporate overlords, naturally) that may possibly help you ignore your problems in exchange for increasing the risks of impotence, psychotic break or suicide. But the treatment shouldn’t be applied by an insane world to you, a normal person under a horrible amount of stress. It should be applied by you to the world.
Offering support to people taking industrial action (eg scones, good cheer or offers of constructive help) strengthens their fight against a diseased economy. Collaborating with your neighbours to build new organisations that people can rely on if they struggle and fall in our sick society is the first step to treating it. Building these bonds of trust in a diverse community can help undermine the assumptions that prop up white supremacy, a poison injected into us on the scale of populations. It’s not a personal panacea, but it’s a way forward.
It’s helped me.
The state of things
Half of the families in this country have less than a thousand pounds in savings. A quarter of them have less than £95 in savings. Average personal debt is nearly ten thousand pounds. And the next crash is coming.
During the last recession in 2009, the number of millionaires doubled, but ordinary people got fired from their jobs by the million and the aspiring bourgeoisie were also hit hard, with tens of thousands of small businesses destroyed by predatory banks. But in those times there was still some semblance of a social safety net. Now though?
Real wages in the United Kingdom have fallen almost as fast as they have in fucking Greece, and they had to deal with a financially bankrupt government; ours is merely morally bankrupt. Many of my friends are living horribly precarious lives, bouncing between shitty jobs with no savings whatsoever. Never stop moving, never sleep, drive for uber, cycle for deliveroo, keep thrashing around, make less than the minimum wage and far less than a living wage, barely keep the creditors of your back, grind your soul down into a fucking pencil nub, every waking moment with an entire media and political machine hammering it into you that if you go bankrupt though it’s because you didn’t strive hard enough.
And austerity continues apace – jobseeker’s allowance is pitiful and can be rescinded on a whim, child support is cut to the bone, there’s still – STILL – foodbanks everywhere, and homeless people everywhere. Cuts to local councils mean mass layoffs and rising council tax. Everything is getting more expensive. The NHS is going to start hoovering money out of people’s pockets soon.
Society, in other words, has been almost completely removed. Thatcher’s utopia is here. The idea that we’re part of a cohesive whole that gives something back if you sell your labour to it? That’s gone, it’s all been cut. We’re getting less and less back; instead we’re told over and over that we’re free agents and we get what we deserve. And the next crash is coming.
I don’t know what it’s going to be, or whether it’ll be even something that starts in this country. It could be the housing market here though, or it might be student loans or the bursting of the tech bubble. Or it could be food insecurity, ‘cos that’s right around the corner for us here on this crowded island sitting on a warming planet. Whatever. It’s coming.
There is so little resilience in our personal finances, and there is so little in the way of government programs to protect us from destitution, and our society is so weak that when the next crash happens there is going to be nothing for people to do except start breaking shit.
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The coming crisis is unavoidable. No-one you vote for will be able to prevent the bubble of fake cheap credit that we injected into the veins of the economy after the 2008 recession from bursting. The only consequential course of action for us is to build local institutions, based not on money but on trust and a spirit of communal aid, that can keep people safe and fed after the machinery of state and capital sieze up. In the aftermath, those humble kitchens and shelters will be the building blocks of something new.
Preparation
They’re getting us ready, you know. This mania about immigrants, the constant pounding drums of war and the glee with which the Tory press respond to the idea of sending gunboats into the Mediterranean to stop people escaping North Africa and coming here? That’s the captains of industry using their influence to prepare us for the future they have made – the cost of their greed is already starting to upend the world’s ecosystem, and the only way they can keep hold of their ill-gotten gains is to start systematically exterminating the people who they have wronged. They want us to watch millions of people die without any inconvenient compassion.
But humankind has the resources and the technology to save everyone! It’s not too late to end the pointless and perverse existence of the billionaires and spend the money they’d hoard and waste on building a new way of living, to repair the planet and create a society of justice where all humans can speak as equals and the person who needs the most help gets the most constructive help.
The repulsive nazi chuds whose resurgent movements are being funded by the same rotten gang of billionaire goblins are proclaiming that if that’s the choice, they’d choose to commit genocide on half the world to validate their fantasies of supremacy and sadism. Make no mistake, the political establishment in this country pursue the same ends even if they don’t announce their motivations as vigorously.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Even now, we can save everyone.