How to prevent debate while claiming to be in favour of it.


When I look around at the state of public discourse in ‘the West’  what strikes me is that everyone says they want to have a reasoned and rational debate but say that the reason it doesn’t happen is because the ‘other side’ is irrational and so they can’t be debated with. The ‘other side’, their opponents say, always avoids the debate, is never willing to just answer a reasonable question and generally just refuse to have the debate they claim to want.  Does this resonate with you?

I see impasse everywhere I look. In the UK between Brexit and Remain supporters and in the USA between Trump and Non-Trump supporters. I see it between Alt-right advocates and Progressives, and between all the various groups within and around identity politics and those they see as their enemies. I see it in every discussion of immigration. I see it between globalists and those they call populists or nativists.

How is this possible?  How can all sides in every debate want to have a reasoned and rational discussion and yet all claim the ‘other side’ is irrational and unwilling to discuss?

Here are some thoughts.

It seems to me that in every one of our contentious social and political debates each ‘side’ comes to the debate with a set of assumptions which they are absolutely sure are the correct and in fact only way of framing the debate. The problem with me suggesting this, is that the people I am talking about will read that sentence and nod happily, feeling quite certain that this is a correct and lamentably true description of people other than themselves. Their own assumptions, if they are aware of having them at all, seem to them to be so basic, so self evident, that it would be wrong to describe them as ‘assumptions’. Sure, other people may have deeply embedded assumptions, but what ‘we’ have is a clear-eyed and unbiased statement of reality.

Sometimes the assumptions which provide the framework for every other thought, statement and debate, are held, I think, almost unconsciously. If  you grow up in a fundamentalist religious culture then Allah, or Jehovah or Christ and his rules are unquestioned and held as unquestionable.

Such assumptions are then nearly always buttressed by an accompanying belief that questioning or denying these most unquestionable assumptions and the version of reality they describe, will lead to utter disaster. In the religious case because god will get peeved and visit some sort of divine anger upon the heads of the unbelievers and possibly even those around them who did nothing to stop the blaspheming.

So far so smug.

But the same logic is there in lots of more secular or ‘rational’ people. For some Capitalism and the workings of the Free Market are so basic, so much just a reflection into human affairs, of the basic nature of reality, that to go against them is ‘irrational’. On the other side there are those for whom a more communist view of human relations seems equally undeniable. Both sides usually claim their view is the only conclusion you can rationally come to if you start from an unbiased and scientific view of human nature. Both exaggerate.

An important part of the fierceness with which people defend their assumptions is often, I think, that they work through what their assumptions lead to and like what they see. But when they  look at what ‘the other side’ espouses and put those things into their own framework of assumptions they find it leads to all sorts of things they find deplorable.  The key thing is they always use their own framework of assumptions to evaluate what the other side’s beliefs ‘must lead to’. Never the assumptions the other side uses.  Each side says to the other – you believe this and that means you must also believe… or that you must be a… . Very often the word fascist comes in to the shouting match at this point.

My view is that everyone comes to the debate wearing mental glasses which show them what they take to be ‘reality’ but which is in fact, a construction, created by the glasses they may be unaware they are even wearing.

So what?

My view is that this means everyone comes to the debate with a framework which includes what they are absolutely sure the ‘other side’ must think.  Why? Well, if you have a framework of assumptions which tells you what the correct answer is then that same framework of assumptions will also tell you what the wrong answers are. It will tell you what the ‘other’ side, the wrong side of the debate thinks.   You will ‘know’ before they open their mouths what they are going to say – more or less – because you are a rational thinking person who has ‘thought it through’. The problem is, the ‘it’ you thought through, which you attribute to the ‘other side’, is what your set of assumptions say the other side must think.

You hear what the other side’s opinion is, find that opinion within the framework of your own thinking and then look at the train of thoughts that – if they were using your assumptions, they must have gone through to get to their conclusion. And you also look around at the other thoughts that – in your logic – would go along with or be a consequence of their expressed view. And you then accuse the other side of those further ideas.  Along the lines of – ‘Well if you say that then you must be in favour of…. You must be a ….!”

How many times in a contentious debate do both sides get really angry because they say – with some justification – that the other side is putting words in their mouth and are making  assumptions about what they think or believe?  Both sides claim the other is doing this and both get angry at the way the other side ‘distorts’ things and doesn’t listen. And both sides then reply, “No we’re not. We’re just showing anyone listening what you ‘really think’ but don’t like to say out loud.”

What I see, is both sides wanting to control how the debate is to be framed. And both sides feel this is legit because they ‘know’ their view is the rational and clear one. The other side is blinded by assumptions.

All sides say they want a rational and reasoned debate but both sides come to the debate assuming that their way of framing the debate, their set of assumptions, are the correct, rational and in fact the only legitimate ones.  Each side comes with its assumptions and expects, demands,  the other side to fit into them …not because they are bullies or irrrational – heaven forfend – but because their’s is the right framework. And to disagree is, by definition, to be irrational.

The only problem is the other side doesn’t see the world the same way. The two sides aren’t starting with an agreed set of assumptions. So each side sees the other as irrational and obstructive. Each side begins by asking a question or making a statement which seems to them to be the correct, legitimate and clear-eyed way of proceeding only to find the other side refusing to go along with the programme. Refusing to answer the questions or trying to avoid it by asking a totally different question. Each side sees the other being obstructive. And each side says of the other side, “Either they’re stupid or they’re doing this because they know they are wrong and would lose!”

And in truth both are correct. For good reason. If you do accept the starting assumptions of the other side in this sort of polarised debate, then by definition you will lose. The logic the other side come with, already contains your beliefs, but in their mental framework ‘your’ beliefs are connected to all sorts of awful ideas.  They can’t understand how you can’t see this. It’s so clear. Of course it is only clear because they are looking at it only from within the framework of their own assumptions.

Each side knows how easy it is to follow the logic which runs from their own assumptions to the ‘correct’ conclusion. And each side wonders how the other refuses to see this. It’s a short step from there to decide that perhaps the other side aren’t that stupid which means they must be malignly, knowingly, deplorably advocating a position they know is wrong.

The other side must be other irrational or evil. Or sometimes both. Et voila! Mutual hatred, intollerance and a strong sense of self-righteous superiority on all sides.

Everyone sincerely believes their assumptions are the correct starting point for any debate and insist the other side fit into the role which the starting assumptions have laid down for them. Which conveniently mean they – the other side – will soon see the error of their ways, lose the debate and come to see how stupid or misguided they have been. Not surprisingly people quickly sense this is what is in store for them if they continue to allow the debate to be framed by the other side’s assumptions.  And so at some point, usually fairly early on, people start to not allow the other side to dictate the framework of the debate. At which point both sides then feel frustrated that the other side is ‘irrationally’ sabotaging the debate by avoiding perfectly good questions and insisting of other irrelevant, unconnected, distracting questions.

Sorry this is a lot of words to say what might be blazingly evident.

But I think we are going to have to begin to admit we have deeply held assumptions and and step back from them far enough to talk about them.  I believe the debate we need at this point has to be about our assumptions and the debate has to happen at this deeper level.  We are going to have to be willing to listen to why other people have different assumptions. And not rule them as somehow illegitimate or unspeakable or deplorable. We need to do this so we can follow the logic of the other side to understand how they get to where they are, why they think that they think. Why they have the fears they do. We need to do this for their assumptions and for our own. And we need to allow them to do the same.

It is the opposite of de-platforming. It’s the other path from using emotive labels to shut people down.

I think there are people who really do not want others to debate and discuss. They don’t want people to come to a better understanding of each other. They want, instead, to keep very tight control over what can and can’t be said and can and can’t be debated. They want people to be angry at each other and to distrust each other. They want to divide people against each other while claiming to be ardent opponents of divisiveness.  It’s a clever ploy. But a dangerous and I think an evil one.

Such people don’t want to ever be accused of shutting down debate. They want to be seen as the champions of debate – rational debate, but all the while managing to prevent it. And the way they do it is by insisting they do not have assumptions. Only the ‘other’ side does. The ‘good’ side has science or evidence or just the moral high ground as their platform.  This is a profound danger. Everyone has assumptions. The essential thing is to admit it, and be willing to discuss them.

There are plenty of people who hold views I find deeply distasteful. But rather than refuse to debate or try to insist that any debate happen within assumptions I have laid down, I prefer to try to get at what logic has led them to their views. What assumptions do they start with and why? What are the fears or the hopes which their assumptions seem to them to provide good answers to?

55 thoughts on “How to prevent debate while claiming to be in favour of it.”

  1. Algie Beechworth

    Very well put, I agree wholeheartedly, but my deeply flawed approach in the past has been to point out that everyone suffers from numerous biases and adopt a devils advocate approach which just caused them to double down, so personal fail there. On a personal level I try to avoid ideological positions so as to minimise the number of assumptions/frames that I accumulate.

    1. Hello Algie Beechworth.

      As you say we all have them. It’s just if we are willing to admit it and occasionally step back from them far enough to have them questioned.

      Thank you for commenting.

  2. Think you nailed it. This book made a deep impression on me years ago along these lines. That theearly ancient Greek shared many common assumptions and so could have rational debates leading to a reasoned outcome around morality. But this started to break down with time (including during Greek times with rise of Socrates) until in modern times we still see the trapping of rational debate aroind us but in fact can no longer engage in it for reasons you citr. The example used then was abortion.
    The first few pages of the book provide a famous metaphor for our situation:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue

    1. Hello Luke,

      Splendid to hear from you. Yes, I remember reading After Virtue and like you thought it was a really wonderful work. His is a deep point – that we can continue to use the language and have that language shepherd our thinking long after the real and original content of of the language has been lost to us.

      When I was writing this piece I was thinking of the way the word fascist is being used. I would like to write a follow on piece about it.

      Hope all is well with you and yours.

  3. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Knowledge-Wisdom-Revolution-Science-Humanities/dp/0955224004

    The above book is very useful here because it points out a key problem with our notion of knowledge and objectivity, it says we need an explicit debate about our aims and values and stop pretending there is any neutral knowledge without aims and values.

    Another problem is poor education about philosophy, lack of teaching in our schools, and poor education about intellectual history, we need a narrative, we need to know the history of our ideas, their origins, in religion, science, secularism and politics.

    And yes, in any debate I look to grasp what the other person’s values and aims and ends are, to understand what our differences are. We need to recognise and articulate our differences, and then ask how we can live with each other’s differences. Or sometimes, of course, we may decide we cannot. But we could choose to live apart rather than to annihilate or suppress each other.

  4. John Ward over the Slog has just written about this very topic; perhaps it is a sign that the divisions are becoming deeper?

    ”I should probably start with a health warning: just about everyone (by the time I’ve finished) is going to be anything from mortified to slightly offended by the content of this post. But this has to be said: the divisiveness at large in Britain today is now so socially and economically dysfunctional, I find myself unable to like anyone involved in it….no matter which side they’re on. Nobody is having a debate any more; as the cynical and destructive opportunism goes up a gear every week, the only clarity that remains is that thousands of people in personal silos are spouting propaganda – and hardly anyone in either the media or politics wants to do anything except assert that they are totally right, and everyone else is one hunred per cent wrong.”

    https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2019/05/14/sketch-britain-a-mess-of-division-lobbies-radical-reticence/

    David, I think we can say, has always been very generous in terms of his openness to debate on this blog.

    At the risk of tarring that generosity and perhaps proving the thrust of the above piece correct, I have to say that I do find that quality rarer on the Left than on the Right. And I say that as someone who considers himself to be an ex-Leftist. Maybe that’s why I say it?

    Perhaps someone should do an analysis of people across the political spectrum and see who is the most tolerant of opinions that they do not share and who has paid what price for the beliefs they do hold.

    For my part, I have tried to bring Left and Right together on a couple of occasions and been sorely disappointed.

    I tried to connect Peter McLoughlin, author of ‘Easy Meat: Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal’ and ‘Mohammed’s Koran’ (with Tommy Robinson) with the left-leaning Mark Curtis who wrote ‘Secret Affairs: Britain’s collusion with Radical Islam’. The former was ready to engage, the latter was not.

    I then informed the left leaning authors of ‘Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the men who stole the world’, Nick Shaxon and John Christensen that I had sent a copy of their book to UKIP’s leader Gerard Batten and that it had been well-received. I asked if they would be prepared to speak about the various issues the book raises at the UKIP party conference. I don’t think it would be unfair to characterise Nick’s response as that he was appalled at the idea.

    I tried to engage the left leaning Media Fund, which is run by a number of ‘anti-racism’ activists, with information regarding the true scale of the religiously and racially motivated organised rape of white schoolgirls. They declined to reply.

    I tried to challenge the views of my intersectional feminist lecturer at Manchester University with data regarding the suicide and mortality rates of white American men. To no avail.

    Perhaps others can provide examples of the Right turning a deaf ear to the Left.

    1. Hello Phil,

      I’ll go have a look over at the Slog. Interesting that we should all be coming to the same sense of frustration. As for your left v right question – I think the left has generally been more intolerant than the right. Which is ironic to say the least given that the left se themselves as champions of openness and enemies of intolerance.

      To my mind the solution to the apparent contradiction is to do with ‘the purity of the revolution’. The right wing has never felt its cause or its members need to be pure. If you are vaguely right then pull up a chair and have a pint – has been the general attitude. The right is not a fussy club. The left however is bedevilled by feeling the revolution needs to be pure. I think it comes from the journey many on the left have gone through personally. For many on the left it has been a personal moral journey and often one that has been painful and entailed some soul searching. There is often a feeling that it takes commitment to be on the left. And in fairness it does – I think. But a bad consequence of this is that it is easy for some to make a fetish or even a weapon out of this moral purity. It is easy of someone who wants to to ask if another persons is ‘pure enough’? How many movements and revolutions have fractured because one group decided other within the ‘movement’ are not dial or pure enough. The Green party which I have been in for many years is rife with it. And all out takes is for someone who wants to grab power, is to say ‘you can’t be a ‘good’ person unless you believe ‘this’. And then another comes along and ups the ante and says that’s not pure – to be really pure and good you must believe this and THIS! and so it goes. Endless holier than thou sneering. So I agree with you it is more of an acid problem on the left. Sadly.

      1. Thanks mate.

        It’s a very interesting topic as to why the divide breaks down as it does.

        In addition to the thoughts you offer above, there is also a body of psychological research which Jonathan Haidt draws on in his book, ”the Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics”.

        It’s also interesting to ask what is the Right? Because it seems to me to be at least as multifaceted as the Left. You go from libertarianism through to fascism – both economically and socially.

        Having tired of the Left in terms of how it does politics and also its general approach to culture and social norms (but not economics), I’ve spent a lot of time looking at what the Right is saying now. I think you’d be surprised how, beyond free markets, they feel quite uncertain – or at least uncertain in standing up to defend the moral and cultural beliefs that they hold. This is a major theme of this talk between Roger Scruton and Douglas Murray:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9IVFhhIyvE&t=1278s

        Their explicit lack of confidence was such that I turned it off after twenty minutes.

        What I would add is poll after poll shows that a significant majority of the public is economically Left and socially / culturally Right. They are just waiting for a party or movement to come along and provide that.

      2. One caveat that I would add is that I do vaguely remember a time in the early 90s, perhaps around the time of Peter Lilly (and his song about having a little list of scrounging single mothers), when the morally Conservative Right seemed fairly intolerant. And as the Tories became mired in ‘sleaze’ towards the end of the John Major government, this moralising became increasingly impossible as their various hypocrisies were exposed.

        The thing that troubles me about the Left is that they currently seem impervious to being called out on hypocrisy. Hence the completely different reactions to attacks on mosques vs attacks on churches or John McDonnell’s incitement to riot over Grenfell Tower vs his party accusing UKIP of ‘politicising’ rape gangs.

        Again, there is some evidence from the world of psychology that liberals hold their beliefs so tightly that if they are undermined they suffer actual physical and mental pain.

  5. Unfortunately we are taught that we can know the world just by thinking about it and that therefore if the logic we use is right, then what we think must also be right. It is the curse of an education that draws on Plato and Socrates.

    Instead, to describe this mathematically, we can consider that we are trying to map a set of ideas onto a good-bad scale – a projection from a multidimensional space to one dimension.

    Our ‘greek’ teaching assumes that as we take small logical steps in the area being discussed we can continue to move our ideas that increase ‘good’ and so come towards a single ‘perfect’ solution.

    However, if we take a helicopter view at the entirety of the space against what is good and bad, we would see that the options are full of hills, local peaks, valleys and cliffs. We can get stuck climbing an isolated logical peak which is a mere hill compared to its neighbours. Two people can end up shouting at each other from the tops of molehills, unaware of the mountain behind them.

    Alternatively we can find that a steady slow improvement in options suddenly gives way to a disaster situation (catastrophe theory).

    Or we might want to choose the best peak from among many, but find the valleys between the peaks mean rewinding logic, making things worse before they get better.

    So if, rather than thinking we are looking for solutions, instead we are looking at a landscape of options and trying to choose paths. And other people see the landscape from different points, and so see different hazards and peaks.

    History reflects the paths we have taken, and our moral viewpoints adjust from this social learning (morality is a learnt construct that emerges from both doing the right thing, and doing the wrong thing but learning from it – its validity is empirical not philosophical).

    Assume the person you are talking to is also an intelligent human being who also wants the best. From the basis that they are also intelligent and thoughtful, try to work out why they judge the world they way they do, what paths they see, and so what might be missing in your worldview and how you can find a path together.

    1. Hello thelonggrass,

      Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I think the ‘landscape’ way of thinking about issues, opinions and solutions is the best way. As you say you can then appreciate that even though all the alternatives you can see from your moral high ground doesn’t mean that your little moral mole hip is just that. A local peak but perhaps no better than other local peaks and a lot worse than a peak you have never considered trying to get to.

      So thank you for talking about it.

    2. English Outsider

      A most useful analogy. A little mind bending of course but then,what else are minds for?

      It’s a lovely approach for understanding the mindset of those whose upbringing is different, who live in a different culture, or have been exposed to different cultural influences. It’s also essential for the historian. If you can’t get yourself into the mindset of those who regarded slavery as normal then how is it possible to understand much of the past? If not into the mindset of those who regarded peasants as so much livestock, how to understand our own even quite recent history.

      Though I sometimes feel we make a little too much of that relativistic approach. After all, not all slaves regarded their condition as normal and not all peasants saw themselves as livestock. Nor all, I think, of those who treated them so.

      But essentially your analogy, and the perspective behind it, has to be adopted. If we do not then we must regard anyone who does not share our Weltanschauung as abnormal. And from there it is but a small step to regarding them as evil, and maybe to be killed or otherwise suppressed.

      To digress, but only slightly, that is the Johnsonian approach. Dr Johnson is perhaps the only political philosopher who never treated of philosophy. He just lived it and thus it was for him implicit, not expressed. A great mass of contradictory prejudice and conviction, but able to see himself as such and able to enquire with unabated curiosity – and as an equal, not a superior – into the culture and views of those with different prejudices and convictions. That weltoffen approach sums up the best of the English liberal tradition, though we must use “liberal” there in a way very different from today’s, and is I believe also expressed in your comment above.

      What about the practical, the mechanical?

      There are some areas where your analogy is ultimately inappropriate.

      If you don’t put petrol in the car it doesn’t go. View that statement as one will, understand the point of view of the man who argues to the contrary as sympathetically as possible, the damn thing still doesn’t go.

      So take one of the simpler debates. Money issuance. That debate brings in with it a host of unstated presuppositions and ideological positions but essentially it’s a mechanical “Does it work?” argument. If you create “money” to a greater extent than is needed for the purposes of trade you end up with disaster. Or at best disaster postponed. That’s true or false independently of the mindset of those arguing the point.

      Sometimes, though, such arguments escape computation. We live in so complex a society, so many interacting variables, that all one can do is wait, figuratively speaking, for all to coalesce around the strange attractor and see what that attractor is.

      So it is with the command economy argument. There’s not a lot mechanically wrong with that argument. Looked at mechanically it can seem a superior mechanism for production and distribution. I was reading Harold Wilson’s biography, and saw there that he and many others believed back then it was so superior that the economy of the Soviet Union was expected to overtake that of the West in the near future. To such thinkers clause 4 was no chimaera.

      They missed some variables. If we are all idealistic altruists then command economy might be superior. I say “might” because it’s appallingly clunky, but the argument’s there. But put the human variable in, allow for the fact that most of us are greedy bastards if we get the chance, and the thing’s a non starter.

      So it proved. But we had to wait to find that out. And even now there are those around who argue that had it been done differently, could we be just a little nicer to each other, command economy is the way to go.

      For most of us it irrefutably isn’t. Factor in all the variables and it’s the way forward to a crony-ridden dysfunctional economy. We know that empirically now. We didn’t earlier. That car ran out of petrol whether we wanted it to or not.

      What about our own crony-ridden dysfunctional economy? Understand the mindset of its orthodox neoliberal proponents as we will, the thing still doesn’t work.

      It’s not just complexity that obscures that. We have inherited such an extraordinarily productive industrial society – nothing like it before in history – that we have a lot of slack to play with. And so those orthodox economists can tell us that a bit of tinkering here, a little more goodwill and civic virtue there, and this dysfunctional society will come good too.

      But there’s no petrol in that car either. We are now at the stage at which we are finding that out empirically.

      Most of the political arguments we are fighting over at present are of that second sort of argument, the practical mechanical “Does it work?” sort. We may navigate those arguments using the peaks and valleys approach. That is a useful tool for understanding those who argue differently. In the end, though, and in most of those political arguments we are engaged in, “Does it work?” will settle the argument for us however we view that argument.

  6. Of course it is much easier being calm and reasonable when you have few financial woes, few threats to your identity or sexuality, are confident, articulate and well educated. Funnily enough these go with people who have benefitted from the status quo. I have been pretty lucky overall but I also remember where I came from, so I find myself to be both economically and socially progressive. I have not been cut off from the wasted potential and unnecessary suffering of many of my friends, family and contemporaries. But I have no time for the purity brigade (do such purists have friends and family? Purity? – old time religion is it not?), my morals suggest trying to share, be kind, aim for fairness, expect to fail rather a lot because the world is causally complex.

  7. Of course the Right get pretty pure minded over thinking submission to the gods of free markets and privitisation is the answer to all our problems (see Paul Mason’s new book Clear Bright Future, anyone else reading this?). Fear of freedom, fear of chaos, fear of openness, fear of difference all mix into the pot. The super-rich are odd, I have never understood the need for unlimited wealth. A little wealth seems more than enough. The money obsessed seem to lack something. Underlying fears, maybe of death and finitude. A culture failing to come to terms with our limited and finite lives, no more compensation that there is an afterlife or heaven. Feeds into our incapacity to overcome non-stop growth and measuring GDP.

  8. Just to be clear, and to state what ought to be obvious, I also think identity politics is too narrow an outlook to get a complete and adequate grasp of our political, social, economic and ecological challenges, it can (although it should not) ignore all the problems faced by people and families who are not part of any minority but are suffering from inequality, unaffordable housing, poor wages, poor benefits, precarity, awful corporate and employer behaviour, poor public and private services, etc. And we should also remember that majority groups are complex, urban and rural, young and old, healthy and unhealthy, many socially conservative and many socially liberal, etc. Is it just me, but the mood was very different in the middle of the last centrist Labour government was it not? The middle classes seemed pretty content during the housing bubble and easy credit, but after the Middle East wars and the bubbles bursting there is no way back, it was all fake unsustainable progress and growth anyway, so I can’t see how there is any right wing or centrist way to tackle our issues, we cannot justify inequality by promising growth for all any more, so we have to try a left of centre alternative, very left I would suggest, and that means much more equality.

    1. Morning David,

      I heartily agree with you. Identity politics may have started with good intentions – and for many still has them – but increasingly I see it being used by people who simply want to divide. In the name of equality they pursue a dissection of society. I have no fondness for how I see it being used.

      As for the last centrist government under Blaiir and Brown I also agree that the wealth was based on debt. And when it burst everyone who thought they had been helped found they had been shafted.

      I don’t think there is any centrist answer.

      I hope you will continue to share you thoughts with us.

  9. https://twitter.com/PMotels/status/1128522847092125696

    HOW TO PREVENT DEBATE WHILE CLAIMING TO BE IN FAVOUR OF IT.
    https://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2019/05/how-to-prevent-debate-while-claiming-to-be-in-favour-of-it/ … #PDC #TheSlog @JoeBlob20 @financialeyes @Albion_Rover @briangukc @mikeukc #ExtinctionRebellion @2013Boodicca @Ian_Fraser @financialeyes #ConquestofDough #GolemXIV @DavidGolemXIV @financialeyes

    https://longhairedmusings.wordpress.com/2019/05/15/how-to-prevent-debate-while-claiming-to-be-in-favour-of-it/

    https://twitter.com/PMotels/status/1128523585885278208
    @StephenStillwe2 @SteveBakerHW @wesfree @jbhearn

  10. People have sought to limit debate from year one. Other people have noticed that and are insisting on debate. Better late than never.

    1. Indeed. I think we need to defend the very idea that ordinary people can and should be able to debate. I feel the idea has been under attack from all sorts of people. Not just the usual suspects from the right but also very many of them on the progressive/left.

  11. J.G. Bennett, in “The Crisis In Human Affairs,” says, “We judge not only ourselves, but any group of which we feel ourselves a part, by intentions, which we perceive, and not by the outcome of actions, which we overlook. We ignore the intentions of other people and groups to which we do not belong, and judge them by their actions and the outcome of their actions. They judge us in the same way, so that we have a situation in which each party can always feel convinced that it is right and the other wrong.”

      1. I’ve just been reminded of this brief conversation by watching a chunk of your program on waves repeated on BBC4. So anyway, here I am again!
        Have you read JGB’s “The Crisis In Human Affairs”?

  12. Benjamin Wilson

    Thanks for posting this Golem XIV, I think it quite correctly summarises the problem.

    I don’t share your optimism, though. It may be true that we are going to have “to begin to admit we have deeply held assumptions and and step back from them far enough to talk about them,” but I can’t imagine us being able to do this until disaster has sufficiently shattered our identities.

    The problem, as I see it, is that contention goes all the way down to the deep and primal questions that modern people are incapable of asking, let alone answering. We develop sophisticated ways of not having conversations, because they’re conversations we’re fundamentally incapable of having.

    1. The European elections seem to be the breakthrough of Eurosceptic parties on the right. The radical right is a diverse club with different background, Language and accents. But a strange fascination with Russia seems to be a common denominator. It is known that the FN party of Le Pen and the Austrian FPÖ maintain ties with Putin’s regime. However, as soon as a new party sees the light of day, such as Vox in Spain or the Forum for Democracy in the Netherlands, friendly words for the Russian dictator immediately follow.

      According to Timothy Snyder, historian at Yale University and author of The Way to Freedom, this is no coincidence. The radical right in the West is not a passing phenomenon, but stands for a new form of politics, tested and found successful in Putin’s Russia. It offers an alternative to our liberal democracy. But don’t call Putin’s European relatives a fascist. That would be too much honor.

      There is a shift in the flow of ideas between East and West. After the end of the Cold War, we expected democracy, the rule of law and the free market to become models for the former Eastern bloc. A counter-movement has been started since 2010. There is a more fundamental argument: that ideas in themselves matter. Since the 1990s, thinking in the West assumed that there was no ideology anymore. That is of course also an idea, and one that leads to political vulnerability. It is the politics of inevitability: the notion that we have what we have because it has to be that way. There are no alternatives, so we have no personal responsibility for our future. Ethics also do not matter, because something automatically ensures that a liberal democracy is established. Capitalism perhaps, or the European Union.
      The rise and fall of that thinking resembles a flow of ideas from West to East and then from East to West. In the 1990s, the Americans and Europeans – offered this policy of inevitability: join the EU and history is over, install capitalism and history is over. What is now approaching us from the East is an alternative that is flourishing on the breeding ground created by this inevitable thinking. That alternative says: a state can be dominated by oligarchs and their media and sustain themselves for a time if you give up fact and only produce fiction. And it can also affect you in the West. That is what Russia has been doing in the US and the EU in recent years, as Trump and Brexit demonstrated.

      Russia will never stop because it literally cannot stop. His whole form of politics starts with the assumption that there is no real world. They see our truth as a lie used to hurt Russia, so their own untruths are a mere self-defense mechanism of a Russia that is eternally under attack. I called that a policy of eternity.

      If you start from that, you will focus on destroying other people’s reality. And while they do, they play the murdered innocence, because you can’t cheat someone if there is no reality. Their dictatorship is a strange form of totalitarianism. The old ideologies were based on a unique absolute truth. For the Nazis it was the race struggle. The Stalinists spoke about the eternal class struggle. Russia stands for “no-talitarianism”. There is literally no truth, no big project. They only export destruction. For them it is about creating doubt and fear.

      In the West we see Russia as an exception to the rule, an apostate. The implicit message is that they will contribute sooner or later.

      That is exactly the politics of the inevitability that speaks. Everyone is on the right track, so to speak, and Russia has lost weight along the way. Snyder explicitly opposes this: He does not believe that there is a trace. Russia simply does something else and offers a real alternative.

      There are trends in our society that we share with Russia. Take the growing inequalities in the Anglo-Saxon world. Take the interdependence between wealth and media interests and what that does to your civil society. Russia gives you answers to that. Russia gives you an idea of what the future can look like.

      When you talk about the politics of inevitability, you immediately think of neo-liberalism. In the 1990s, a large part of the center left swallowed the neoliberal drink, the idea that capitalism automatically creates democracy. I am thinking of the Clintons, the Blair’s and the Schroder’s. You see that left and right have come together in the abdication of responsibility for structures. For the libertarian right, the state is by definition tyrannical, but the left also came along with the idea of the state as the problem.

      On a more intellectual level, the left went along with a post-modern rejection of fact. Someone always has a role in producing facts, so in the end it is always oppressive to resign yourself to factual truth. If you go along with that, you open the door to much worse things. Then you create competition about owning the glasses that you use to look at the world.

      Ultimately, this is infinitely more tyrannical. The Russians understand that very well. You can distrust ad infinitum and eventually believe in something completely ridiculous.

      Let me give you an example: a Bruno Latour (French philosopher of science and author of, among other things, “Politiques de la nature”) has made himself credible in criticizing scientific truth. And in the end he realized that his propositions were being used by deniers of global warming.

      Politics in Russian also emphasize ethnicity, exclusive identity, which Snyder calls “a politics of being.” That is dangerous in a diverse society such as the European one. A general attitude that the personal comes before the political. Then you can never find anything that you would have in common. Our identity is so infinitely different that there is no basis for my difference with you. Politics can only work if you recognize that you share things with each other. Otherwise policy becomes impossible. Hence the implosion of the center. With the center we don’t mean a position between left and right, but a place where we meet. What we are experiencing is the implosion of a public forum, an agora. Yet Putin’s relatives in Europe pose as the defenders of “democracy.” For example, they like to use referendums. The Nazi lawyer Carl Schmitt had a concept of “Ausnahmezustand”, a “state of exception” whereby the dictator cancels the normal course of justice for the public interest. Referenda are a good example of what Snyder calls “not even fascism.” They create such an exceptional situation while they don’t have the courage to call it that. They will claim that a referendum is more democratic than representative democracy, but in the meantime they do their best to make it as chaotic as possible. Dark money flows in from abroad during the campaign and you create an unregulated noise. The referendum on Ukraine in the Netherlands was a good example because it is explicitly about one thing but actually about something completely different. Nobody in the Netherlands was awake with the details of an association agreement, but they managed to talk about so-called terrible instability that would come from the East. The Brexit referendum has thus created a miniature “state of exception” in Great Britain. Democracy has fallen into a kind of pit from which it will no doubt revert. But in the meantime you have lost three years of your life.

      In Snyder’s book he shows that Putin ideas are to some extent based on Russian fascist thinkers. Putin’s relatives in the West, however, who Snyder’s calls the “Not even-fascists.” Have a slightly different approach. An important difference is in their response to emergency situations. The fascists said: there is an economic crisis, we need more land and so we have to invade other countries. The fascist therefore puts on the mantle of “tragic responsibility”: I have to take an extreme measure because I cannot do anything else. The “not even fascist” takes a fundamentally irresponsible attitude. He knows that a catastrophe is coming and he will lie a bit about it and do nothing else. It is an essential passive-aggressive attitude. In the context of climate change, it is interesting that all of these people, from FPÖ and AfD to Trump, all respond in the same way. They will say that climate change is uncertain, and people who want to do something about it are laughed at.

      You wonder if they do it intentionally. If climate change gets out of hand, you will only get larger refugee flows. Then they can continue to play their game of Muslim against Christian, American against Hispanic ad infinitum. That is the western version of the politics of eternity. The habit of attacking climate activists is a striking feature. Rivals called Greta Thunberg on Twitter a “narcissistic puberty peril”. Which brings us to another difference with the fascists. Fascism in the 1930s was an exaggerated response to a masculinity crisis. They started to dress in uniforms, celebrate masculine beauty, parade in the streets and eventually die in a war. “Not Even-fascism” is another crisis, of men who are afraid to meet other men, are afraid of women and apparently also of teenage girls. But they are not afraid to tweet about it behind their smartphone, which of course is very pathetic.

      If you are a really serious conservative who wants a Renaissance, are you really going to start cursing teenagers? Of course not. You would be respectful, perhaps paternalistic, but always respectful. While the irresponsibility of the radical right seems just as adolescent.

      The fascists had a kind of distorted notion of responsibility. Hitler knew that his people did not want a war on the Eastern Front, but he saw this as his historical mission. The fascists said the future works against us, so we have to do something dramatic.

      The Not Even-fascist actually says “who cares.” The only thing we do is stir up emotions in the present and thus divert attention from the real dangers. If you deny global warming, you deny that time is advancing. You deprive society of the future by sabotaging the present. The adolescent is in the expectation that it will be okay.

      In a way, they need the mainstream that they are raging against, just as an adolescent needs a patient dad – or mom –
      The fascists wanted the mainstream out of the mainstream, while the radical right wants everything at the same time. They want to be able to continue to portray themselves as victims. Donald Trump wakes up every day as a victim, even though he is president of the most powerful country in world history. Even if these people are in a coalition, they are victims of the mainstream. They actually have no notion of the future, of what could be a better future, except an idealized past. They are constantly stuck in the past, eternally fighting with some kind of conspiracy. Fascists also faced one Big Lie, while the ideology of the European radical right has something ad-hoc and eclectic. A big lie is something that completely reorganizes reality, while these people tell lies that are big enough to ruin a conversation for weeks and months. They tell medium-sized lies such as the birthplace of Barack Obama, or that Mexico will pay for the wall, that Brexit will provide millions of pounds for health care. That last statement has messed up a whole referendum, but it was not a Great Lie as the Nazis told it. It’s about confusing reality for so long that you can no longer use sensible policy. Russia excels in that game. When they annexed Crimea, they told in one forum that Kiev was taken over by fascists, in another forum that the Maidan was a Jewish conspiracy. That cannot be logically true. A Big Lie must have a little more consistency. The nation state is not so much a lie, but rather a fundamental misconception shared by just about everyone. Both right and left maintain the myth that there was once a family of nation states that established the EU at some point. With the implication that you can also get out. That while there has never been a Dutch or Austrian nation state. The truth is that the Netherlands, Britain and other countries were imperial powers. Only when the European empires became untenable did the European Union replace it. That is fairly unique in history. When an empire collapses, everything is normally lost. The European Union held everyone straight.

      That is fascinating, but nobody sees it that way. Everyone tells the story that the nation state was enlightened after the war and founded the European Union. That is not true, you fought and lost until you lost The British Empire. Then Europe was there to help you out. Part of forgetting is to lie to yourself. Instead of Indochina, the French talk about Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman. The Belgians talk about Spaak instead of about Congo. And nationalism is dangerous because you can’t go back to an empire. It is dangerous because there are still empires around. Russia sees its politics in imperial terms. It correctly recognizes that the EU is stronger than Russia. They do think that the EU is temporary and that they can overthrow the union. That the EU is a temporary entity, they also imprint their diplomats at their academies. Russia is not even the strongest empire. China is stronger. Google is stronger. Amazon is stronger. The myth exists that you can leave the EU and come back home. The reality is that if you leave the EU you will end up in another world, one where you have less protection against all of that. You can draw a dark conclusion from this: integrate or die.

      There is a strong argument for the EU to make from potential negative consequences. But there is also a positive argument. Think of all the things that you can do in the EU that are impossible like the Netherlands, Belgium, Croatia or England alone. Protect and expand the welfare state. Tackling climate change. Put Google in its place with stricter regulation.

      Against the irresponsibility of the “not even fascists” Snyder places a “policy of responsibility”.
      Countries must acknowledge that history is real and that your future depends on your choices. Inevitability says that you do not have to do anything, eternity says that you simply cannot continue to get stuck in an eternal struggle with the other who is always guilty. Responsibility means that you have to learn from the past and know what your chances are. And act accordingly.

      Brexiteers imagine that England will somehow revive a British Empire. The options are indeed integration on the one hand and empire on the other, but the empires in question are no longer British. The EU insulates its citizens from the empires of today: China, America, Russia; Amazon, Google, Facebook. Should Brexit take place, today’s Brexiteers will be tomorrow’s agents of foreign empire. Some of them already are.

      The historical function of the EU is to gather together the fragments of failed European empires. To forget this basic historical truth, as Europeans — and Britons in particular — have managed to do, is to risk the very form of life that they take for granted.

      1. “Brexiteers imagine that England will somehow revive a British Empire.”

        I tried this on an elderly friend of mine, one of the few left who actually lived the Empire. She just laughed. This is 2019!

        Let’s get real. It was not a civilisational empire. As a full fledged imperial dream it was of very short duration. The man (wrongly) regarded as the apostle of Empire, Kipling, was foreseeing its disintegration barely 20 years after Disraeli got up to his theatrics with Queen Victoria. Of course there’s a sentimental attachment to that part of our history. Of course there were many good people who really believed in the then version of R2P – the “white man’s burden” – and who did their best to transform a bodged together collection of trading posts into a force for good.

        Of course there’s all that. But it goes for nothing against the disasters the disintegration of Empire left scattered around the globe and against the overtly predatory nature of the enterprise that lay behind the R2P cover. Closer to home, take the disastrous 1921 settlement with Ireland – so much of that was forced by imperial arrogance and the fear that if Ireland could leave so could others.

        And at home it diverted the energies of some of our best and brightest in the political/administrative classes from attending to business at home to foolish and destructive adventure abroad. The only true lesson we can take from that period of Empire is “don’t”.

        But it was so long ago. I’ll accept that it reached out from beyond the grave, Empire, and contaminated the thinking of our administrative/political classes perhaps even up to the present. All that nonsense about “punching above our weight”, “Greece to their Rome”, a “place at the top table” was a constant refrain from the ’50’s on and is still occasionally heard. But to assert that it was motivation for so many of us in the general population who voted “leave” is to propagate a meme that has no basis in reality.

        1. Summarising recent developments, Slobodian argues that:
          ‘the formula of right-wing alter-globalization is: yes to free finance and free trade. No to free migration, democracy, multilateralism and human equality’.
          Indeed, global capitalism adores national sovereignty, and merely despises its popular democratic foundations and applicability, which decades of neoliberalism have systematically corroded. The present rise of illiberal forces, therefore, might not prove a rupture to the established order, but rather anchor its global dominance, as ‘political illiberalization might equally shield the economic core of the neoliberal project from popular resistance, effectively functioning as its toxic protective coating’ – not least to safeguard the offshore world of property.
          A quick look into the data leaks mentioned earlier reveals that most authoritarian ‘strongmen’ themselves have secured their assets and incomes offshore, along with a sizeable faction of the global billionaire class who sponsor them. Cynically, the same is true for the global media barons having supplemented their neoliberal narratives with nativist venom, selling the virtues of patriotism while themselves living as true ‘citizens of nowhere’, owning multiple passports to minimise the taxes on their vast business interests structured offshore.
          Adam Ramsay talks about the offshore billionaires supporting the rise of nationalist movements and reactionary autocrats.
          The rise of Bolsonaro or Trump, the advent of Brexit – on closer inspection these and other political developments driven by ‘dark money’ suggest an offshore billionaire’s rebellion rather than a people’s anti-establishment revolt.
          Meanwhile, even the chairman of the high church of neoliberalism – the World Economic Forum (WEF) – is semantically distancing himself from ‘globalism’ to better accommodate ‘national interests’ under globalization, notwithstanding the fact that global capitalism built
          by and for the offshore billionaire class annually congregating in Davos simply rages on like before.
          [Behind] the Alt-Right, we find a vulgar celebration of unrestrained corporate power behind a façade of ‘refreshing’ memes and cultural narratives, revealing a remarkable continuation of neoliberalism in general and a radically deepening of corporate sovereignty in particular.
          Looking at what has euphemistically been labelled Alt-right, moreover, we find a vulgar celebration of unrestrained corporate power behind a façade of ‘refreshing’ memes and cultural narratives, revealing a remarkable continuation of neoliberalism in general and a radically deepening of corporate sovereignty in particular.
          For their ideal capitalist state fully rejects the premises of liberal democracy, seeing presidents replaced by CEOs running their states as corporations, maximising shareholder value for their ultimate beneficial owners: the global billionaire class.
          Under what thinkers like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin label Gov-Corp, politics is deemed illegal and citizens are stripped of their rights – the only human right will be ‘exit’ for those who can afford it, meaning capital flight, upholding the cast-iron right of capital mobility. In what can only turn into an endless race to the bottom, future Gov-Corp states will forever compete for hyper-mobile offshore capital.
          Notwithstanding populist appeals of popular democracy, the aim of these self-proclaimed challengers to the global order is to reach neoliberalism’s final frontier: the full corporate takeover of sovereign governments and states themselves.
          Although this prospect has yet to materialise, contemporary capitalism is increasingly turning into a global platform economy, with offshore finance as its central operating system and the rest of the world plugged into its dominant operating logic on various terms.
          Where ordinary citizens and businesses are subject to global capitalist rule via their respective states – enforcing austerity, taxes and, increasingly, authoritarianism – offshore residents have grown above territorial enclosure, having effectively become a global ‘stateless’ oligarchy, living secretive and tax-free lives with their vast fortunes supported by expansionary monetary policy.
          Representing the very crown of capital’s defeat of labour, the offshore world is threatening to give rise to an age of ultra imperialism, as an increasing number of states have effectively joined in an offshore federation, ‘replacing imperialism by a holy alliance of the imperialists’.
          The offshore world already operates as a global incorporated Leviathan, as the world’s ultimate creditor state, with a handful of global banks, law and accountancy firms ‘seeing like a state’. In this capacity, moreover, these (para-) financial players wield classic hegemonic power elsewhere, exerting ‘functions of leadership and governance over a system of sovereign states’, as clearly exemplified throughout the financial crisis, where they advised clueless governments to bail out the troubled offshore portfolios of the few at the price of austerity for the many.
          We have reached the point, like in the Hunger Games trilogy, where citizens across the ‘districts’ of the world need to rise up and unite against the Capitol of our age – the offshore world – threatening to transform the international system of states into a present-day Panem, enforcing its global rule through local strongmen.
          Citizens worldwide need to reclaim democratic oversight over what constitutionally is – or should be – popular sovereignty. This will require exposing nationalist nostalgia, sugarcoated with xenophobia, as hyped-up distractions from the power grab by the offshore Capitol. It will need a spotlight on global corporations and elites avoiding public responsibility and scrutiny who urgently need to be relieved from the vast political power they enjoy and exert.
          Although the fight will prove difficult, with no quick fixes, it offers a narrow political target to mobilize a broad political base, one that can bring together the indignant and deplorable, uniting red squares, green ambitions and yellow vests. For only a truly collective struggle to dethrone offshore finance opens up possibilities to really take back control.

  13. “[W]e have deeply held assumptions and [need to] step back from them far enough to talk about them.”

    Yes, we do need to step back … but all the way: There is no (certain) knowledge. It is *all* belief.

    No human can know that they know *anything* external to that human, and no human can know everthing. We’re all necessarily limited. (This underlies democracy’s one person – one vote rule, as well as the approaches of science.) I’m pretty sure this is patently obvious to most people, but seems to continually slip out of consciousness at the worst times.

    Maybe it’s just terrifying to most of us (left or right) to be without moorings. It messes with our psychologically-grounding civic and religious certitudes. So cognitive dissonance defense kicks in, and we spit out any awareness of our uncertainties. And suffer the consequences.

  14. What we want is better public dialogue. Debate is a rather specialised form of rhetoric. Sadly, the ideal type of communicative action aimed at mutual understanding is a castle in the air and remans so no matter how many times one reads leftist scripture like Habermas or the preaching of neo-classical economists based on the self-interested yet ‘rational’ homo economicus. All we can really expect is a bridled irrationality. We clearly need to be able to hear more voices, to tolerate each other better and help those finding articulation of their experience difficult. Science has demonstrated we are all resistant to other people’s expression and ideas. Culture is a serious block to free expression and all cultures are based in agnotology, politesse and etiquette made sacred rather than open to critique. The science here is not difficult, yet is hardly present at all in general social conversation or the gloop of main media. Socrates claimed to have an inner daemon that prevented him from exploiting others not good in dialogue or capable of philosophy rather than poetics and rhetoric. We know a great deal more about human nature now and could do with starting in admission we are all hooked on emotions and that debating skill is too often an act pretending the objective voice and manipulating the appearance of politeness. In the absence of bottled inner daemon we should be looking to science and how we keep its languages out of public discourse and newsrooms.

  15. David,
    You are essentially putting forward Socrates’ interrogation. He was always asking ‘why do you think that’? Answers were usually poor. People are not good at explaining the reasons for their beliefs. Back amongst the ancient Greeks it was commonplace for experts to use language admitting their doubts between themselves and doing the opposite when relating to the mug-public (doctors were then the classic exponents). The demagogue espousing rubbish to the simple-minded crowd was touted as a reason democracy could never work even amongst Persians considering it as a potential form of government long before Athens when Darius seized power. Otanes, a Persian businessman was a democracy advocate and Mardonius established democracies in place of tyrannies in Ionia amongst Greeks before he set out on punitive action against Athens. Even back then there were people in power thinking democracy a form of participative government they could manipulate. Now we have Trump and Theresa May essentially using the sloganising method of chapter 6 of Mein Kampf. The masses are deemed so stupid argument is abandoned in favour of constant reiteration of slogans like ‘we’re gonna build a wall’, ‘strong and stable’, ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and ‘delivering the will of the people’. May in PMQs hardly answers a question and favours logic-chopped statistics worse than the extreme beyond damned lies.

    Argument seems a good thing, but it relies on people being able to do it. Think of someone urging us to be “proud to be British”. Tough for those of us who know actual British history and those cheering are unlikely to know figures like Faraday, Maxwell, Hodgkin or ED Morell. Churchill remains a ‘good guy’ in our popular culture. Even people on our side of climate change are often emotionally swayed and have the relevant models confused.

    You raise important stuff here. We need the question marks in deeper. This deep questioning itself is widely resisted and most don’t tolerate the ambiguity or cognitive dissonance well. I’ve recently conducted a literature search on the ancient Greek times using only what can be gleaned from free sources in the public domain. Even in this one can get far beyond the heroic foundation of western values common in films like 300 and mass ideology. One can get close enough to the facts doing such public domain searching across the board, yet I failed to get most of my undergraduates to learn these ‘keyboard plus’ skills. I fear responsible argument urging lapses quickly to the “civility” that prevents dialogue with concern for facts our Parliament and such as the BBC specialise in. What did Socrates do as a soldier of a slave society that perpetrated genocides or whether Churchill was racist in his role in the Indian famine are sidelined in civility before we start. As are questions about why Parliament is still medieval in the forum and methods of its arguments in the electronic age. Why even restore the building when a regionalised electronic network could improve discourse and actual MP representation of those suffering and re-victimised by ministers lying with impunity with ‘statistics’? ‘Jonathan Pie’ hits a few nails on the head on civility.

  16. The way the brexit party gained seats got me thinking.

    A new political party. Full brexit but free trade for all and a welcome sign at Dover.

    Tax the rich but not enough so that the black suv runs you down.

    Harras the feckless but not too much.

    A party that has clear goals that are bold taken from all sides of the spectrum.

    Leaving enough loopholes for the clever but the hordes tow the line.

    In the current climate with enough clever advertising it would be perfect.

  17. Interesting article, David! I think this would make a good documentary comparing the current state of affairs described above in comparison with the thoughts of Nietzsche Jung etc on the death of God and myths. I believe the two are inextricably linked.

  18. Hello David, Hello Golem City.

    Time flys and a General Election or some sort of constitutional fudge is afoot.

    https://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2019/05/how-to-prevent-debate-while-claiming-to-be-in-favour-of-it/

    https://longhairedmusings.wordpress.com/2019/09/09/how-about-a-democracy-where-you-get-to-join-in-the-internet-and-democracy-two-things-that-are-done-to-you-lets-change-that/
    What are your plans in Scarborough David? is the Brexit party going to take on Rideout? are you going to stand as an independent or for one of the other parties? WOuld be grat to hear an answer to that on a live stream.

    I have been busy with The Grub Street Journal and woke this morning to the Notion

    Instead of the Internet being something done to you, how about an internet where you get to join in? A proto slogan, not very good as yet but I do think that is what the Internet has become its very much something which is done to us in the same way that Television broadcasting became and still is something which is done to us.

    I have been very deep down the web/Internet hole.
    the web has a system of conventions and

    ….
    so the web is entirely separate
    10:21
    the if you think of the Internet as an
    10:23
    ocean then the web is folks that float
    10:25
    on the ocean”
    TheTedNelson

    1. It works.

      There are scripts for dynamic updating to IPNS ( for the techies.)

      This is uncensorable web 3 computing, all the hypertext is to do with rendering HTML which is a trivial matter for poit to point encryption, where Blockchain comes in is for network communications and time stamping, Blockchain may well not be the simplest way of approaching the problem which is what my last two blogs are pointing at. ( end Note ) Bench notes, please ignore.

  19. Innuendo Studios did a good video which purports to describe the fundamental assumptions behind liberal and conservative views. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs As both I and the creator of the video lean left, possibly it’s inaccurate, but it rang pretty true to me, and made me look at conservative politics a little differently.

    ContraPoints has also done some good stuff about the tendancy for the left to be purist and completely unconcerned about whether they’re successfully arguing their case to non-converts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuN6GfUix7c

        1. https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/the-contrapoints-twitter-debacle-explained#discussion

          There are so many bad op-eds about Twitter Mobs already—from Bret Stephens comparing them to French Revolution to David Brooks’ failed attempt to portray a Twitter troll as a modern day Travis Bickle—that I swore never to waste time on the subject. However, with the recent controversy over transgender YouTuber Natalie Wynn’s (a.k.a. ContraPoints) tweets about sharing pronouns, it’s time to join the discourse over The Discourse because the debacle brings up several important issues that have been overlooked.

  20. 27 Sep 19
    Long overdue you wrote a piece on here DM.
    Seismic events require commentary and analysis.
    Hope you are well and busy.

    1. A country that is clear with its past is, according to journalist Géraldine Schwarz, less susceptible to populism.
      If you want to learn from history, you must dare to look her in the eye – for Géraldine Schwarz, documentary maker and writer of the bestseller Les Amnésiques (The Memoryless) that is no empty words. Her German grandparents belonged to the so-called Mitläufer in the Nazi era: no war criminals or fervent National Socialists, but people who let it all happen. They also benefited from the expropriation of a Jewish business partner.

      “With the rise of populism in Europe, you also see revisionism returning, the manipulation of history for ideological use. Are we doomed to make the same mistakes after three generations? Indifference enables a regime to consolidate. The Third Reich was not there overnight, Hitler constantly looked how far he could go. The first deportation in Mannheim was a test. Some welcomed it, but most people shrugged and acted like nothing really happened. If the vast majority of the population does not consist of hangmen but of followers, what can we learn about them afterwards? That there are always ways to make a counter-noise being heard, even without your life being in immediate danger. And that you can also prevent certain developments, so that you ultimately do not have to choose. I think that we are in such a situation in Europe at the moment. Realize that you are not an unwilling bystander, that you can play a role in history as an individual. Often enough you have a choice. You just have to choose on time.

      ”The Holocaust and fascism eventually made the Germans aware of the importance of their responsibility, individually and collectively, for a democracy. I see consciousness of the past not so much as a moral duty but as an instrument to protect what we have. Pluralism is the basis of a democracy. Among contemporary populist parties you have moderate and more extreme parties, but what they have in common is that they speak from an idea of “the people”. Anyone who falls outside of it is not regarded as a citizen in a democracy, but as someone who does not belong. The principle of pluralism is denied. I regard that idea of “the people” as offensive, because it is mostly about people at the bottom of society. People talk about them as if they only have one vote – that of hatred. ”Most populist politicians say that they are very democratic. “They use strategies already described in 1885 by the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon in The Psychology of the Masses, a book that has been eagerly read by Mussolini and Goebbels, and perhaps by Hitler. If you want to play the masses, he wrote, you have to make use of the fact that the way people experience things is usually not in line with reality. So: calling that our beautiful country will break, our beautiful civilization is in ruins. Creating the impression that Europe is hopelessly weak and decadent. That the catastrophe of the “population” awaits us. It is not a real point of view, the figures do not confirm that picture. “Second, according to Le Bon, you have to exploit people’s fears. We are currently in an identity crisis. That is not strange, given the globalization. Where do I come from, who am I, what role does my language, my culture, my race, my ideas play? Then the simple answer is: national identity. Then you don’t have to ask yourself further questions. The other form of identity, the more European version, is that you can decide who and what you are. As a counterforce that is difficult, because you say: I don’t give you identity, I give you the freedom to choose one yourself. ”

      “A hundred years ago Fascism and Communism tried to impose a single identity on everyone. Now you see the same attempt at manipulation, the freedom of people must be limited to one identity. We must be alert to parties in Europe who are going to tell us who we are. What Le Bon also writes is that in order to play to the masses you have to give people the feeling that they belong to a chosen group. A hundred years ago it was the Volksgemeinschaft. You see that now with the alt-right movement, then you are very special if you are white, heterosexual and Christian. And finally you have to blur the line between lie and truth. When people no longer believe in anything, distrust everything, they are easy to manipulate. That all sounds pretty up to date, right? ” This is what Britain looks like today.
      Do you understand that desire for a good feeling? To a past with which one can identify positively, a feeling of being at home? “People need that emotion. At a European level, this bonding is difficult to evoke because the people are so different. People often have a special bond with their immediate environment, which can be very specific, their place of birth, their language, and their food. We should not be so frenetic about it. But that can very well go together with an idealistic project such as a united Europe, the need to cross the borders of our small world. We need both emotions. ”

      Without acknowledgment of mistakes, you cannot have peace with the past, with the victims, nor with the enemies of yore. That is a basic psychological fact. A mature democracy must be able to face the past. It is such an outdated idea that when you evoke demons from the past, you can only become less. Only using the past to make yourself feel good, to be able to glorify, really, that is something from the nineteenth century. ”

      Let us hope Britain will choose a path of history our future generations can be proud of.

      1. Jacob November 2, 2019 at 1:15 pm #

        https://longhairedmusings.wordpress.com/2019/04/09/relativistic-dialectics-relativistic-dialectics-georges-metanomski-on-the-50th-anniversary-of-the-liberation-of-auschwitz-brexiteers-the-new-jews/

        “Wer Jude ist, entscheide ich” – “It’s me who decides who is a Jew”.

        Who decides what is Brexit?

        who decides what is online harm?

        In the new Fascist EUssr Climate Deniers and BrexitDivergents will be wearing yellow C’s and Yellow B’s in yellow starred armbands.

        With Extinction rebellion, ( The new Hitler Youth) and The new Fifth Reichs economics ( The Green New Deal) the narrative of Green Fascism based upon the Climate Change religion the NewSpeak of !)(¤ is upon us, decoding the narrative !)(¤ = shift !)(¤ = 1984

        All you need is a pair of Sunglasses.

        https://bit.tube/play?hash=QmbvEhyv17FipzNVo1H97RAr3yGSUAcjWqv83f3FRFF6tM&channel=285685

        “Thus, the major output of the modern international Mass Media consists of only four categories:
        1. Good presented as bad
        2. Bad presented as Good
        (That is to say simple inversion)
        3. Good presented as Good for a bad reason
        4. Bad presented as bad for a bad reason
        (That is to say explanatory inversion)
        These four categories, which can be summarized as either simple or explanatory inversion, account for all sustained and high impact modern major Mass Media stories without any exceptions.”
        Professor Bruce Charlton, Addicted to Distraction.
        https://wikiballot.vivaldi.net/2019/11/05/captain-euro-unentangles-brexit-with-the-help-of-pinocchio-grubstreetjorno-survation-wiki_ballot-financialeyes-davidgolemxiv-joeblob20-iabato-theslog-grubstreetjournal/

        1. Roger G Lewis November 5, 2019 at 8:58 am # #ConquestofDough #NaziPug #AlisonChabloz #FreeSpeech #FreeTommy

          Given that Britain’s 8th Eton-educated Tory PM gave birth to Brexit, whilst his classmate and 9th Eton-educated Tory PM is now expected to magically ‘deliver it’, Some still find it hard to believe that this all was somehow a political accident.

          Let me try to explain.

          Not a past event or future prospect, Brexit is better viewed a process of ongoing disruption of established political institutions, norms and procedures. Communicating via social media whilst shunning press conferences is one of them. Shutting down parliament is another one. Brexit is an idea and tactic, continuously testing the limits of what is constitutionally possible, demolishing established institutions and conventions along the way. The only relevant questions are: Is it legal? Can we get away with it? This is the new philosophy of government. This philosophy, which also guides Trump, Orbán and many others, does resemble the psychopath mindset of private equity asset strippers, who destruct to fill their pockets. In this sense, Brexit represents the total victory of a contract-based hyper-financialized world order. Although Brexiteers present themselves as challengers to the established order, adopting a democratic righteousness packaged as ‘the will of people’, behind the populist rhetoric are incumbent political forces at work – like those Eton classmates – set to break liberal democracy. Where decades of neoliberalism effectively put up the world for sale, giving rise to trillion-dollar companies and a billionaire class who have steadily corroded liberal democracy and the public interest, Brexit now signals the leveraged billionaire buyout of government itself. Hence, Brexit is Britain’s crowbar used to break down the core institutional framework within which neoliberalism was born, with all kinds of checks, balances and rights defining liberal democracy under threat by ‘lawfare’ waged by coopted strengthening executive power for sale. Think of Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament, which effectively switches off the legislative branch of government to create (extra-) executive leeway to deliver Brexit. Similar attacks on separations of powers and wider checks on absolute rule are visible across the west. Besides efforts to subject independent judiciaries and the rule of law to power-hungry executives, larger societal counter powers such as independent academia and media are subject to political intrusion, alongside a range of basic, constitutional and/or fundamental rights. Again, these processes are mainstreaming across the west. It does not signal the end of neoliberalism, but seeks to anchor preceding rounds of neoliberalization with political illiberalization, functioning as a protective coating to shield billionaire-class corporate capitalism. Taken together, this constitutes a profound geopolitical shift: in short, where the ‘illiberal’ non-west was once expected to adopt western liberal democracy following their embrace of capitalism, Brexit suggests that the west is now illiberalizing in the image of the non-west.

          If you include places like Hong Kong into the western basket case, you have another neoliberal city state par excellence resisting political illiberalization, in this case coming from the mainland. Five years ago, Britain and the US would not have looked away – now they do. Mind you, the non-west is illiberalizing rapidly too. Besides Xi and Putin having tightened their grip, states that more or less embraced liberal democracy over the latter decades – think of Turkey, Brazil, India, and many others – have recently taken decisively illiberal turns. In this sense, Brexit might be seen as (neo-)colonialism or imperialism coming home. The question is whether we could still label this emergent world ‘neoliberal’. I don’t think so. As argued elsewhere, Brexit heralds a global age of neo-illiberalism.

          Exactly. Once this is over, and we all look back, we might realize that #Brexit (understood as the nationalization of EU rules, which often functioned as templates for global standards) was about global corporate integration, travelling on the back of a faux nationalist project.

          In a few months the elite will have created the “isle of jersey” of the coast of europe.

          From Modi in India to Bolsonaro in Brasil, from Xi and Putin to Trump and Johnson, Right Wing nationalists worldwide are the political supporters of the global embedding of “surveillance capitalism.” The relationship is deeply symbiotic.

          Boris Johnson now rules out a Scottish independence referendum deal. This is Classic Johnson, to reduce the essence of democracy to an (ill-defined, non-binding, fraudulent) Brexit referendum, and then deny those operating logic elsewhere.

      1. Hello Jacob,
        My plan is to keep calm and carry on.
        Grub Street Journal, WikiBallot, being the change etc.
        WEB 3 and P2P computing offers an unrivalled and further opportunity to raise awareness of the choices in the world. FOr my own part, I deal with what is connected to me and nearest and dearest and work outwards from my own centre which I try to keep grounded and truthful.
        On specifics, the Pen is mightier than the sword and HTML and JAVA Script with some love will conquer all.

        Your comment popped up here

        https://thefourpamphleteersofgrubstreet.weebly.com/

        I am building a web 3 RSS app

        see here,
        https://longhairedmusings.wordpress.com/2019/05/11/web-3-ipfs-intermediaries-in-a-disintermediated-world-coals-to-newcastle-gcmaf-effectivecancertreatment-bigpharma-davidnoakes-web3-anticensorship/

        so as I say,

        Keep Calm and carry on hopefull I get to play some guitar and write some poetry too

        1. I would advise you to look closer at what you are witnessing ….

          – ‘’ I would only say that the EU has led the charge and as such Remain or Leave are two sides of the same coin ‘’

          ‘’Figuring out why has become a core part of Philippon’s academic research, and he offers his answer in a fascinating new book, “The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets.” In one industry after another, he writes, a few companies have grown so large that they have the power to keep prices high and wages low. It’s great for those corporations — and bad for almost everyone else. The European economy certainly has its problems, but antitrust policy isn’t one of them. The European Union has kept competition alive by blocking mergers and insisting that established companies make room for new entrants. In telecommunications, smaller companies often have the right to use infrastructure built by the giants.’’

          https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/10/opinion/big-business-consumer-prices.html

          – WEB 3 and P2P computing offers an unrivalled and further opportunity to raise awareness of the choices in the world. For my own part, I deal with what is connected to me and nearest and dearest and work outwards from my own centre which I try to keep grounded and truthful. On specifics, the Pen is mightier than the sword and HTML and JAVA Script with some love will conquer all.

          Our freedom will be systematically removed.

          “During my session I was asked about the biggest threat to the future of global liberal democracy. My answer was Narendra Modi”
          https://twitter.com/FT/status/1193846621269872640

          “the strange history of Milton Friedman & his neoliberal clan designing freedom indexes which explicitly excluded democracy and deemed all social rights “forced labor requirements imposed on others.” A parable about authoritarian capitalist utopia. “

          https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/11/democracy-defenders-economic-freedom-neoliberalism?CMP=share_btn_tw

          Take care, Roger Out

          1. Cheers Jacob you too.
            The Author of this Blog has written a lot about TTIP, of course, it takes two to Tango and the EU were an enthusiastic partner in that particular Dance.
            Whilst the TTIP Band seems to have stopped playing just now, super plus Canada sounds a lot like it to me.
            Heres Golem XIV , David Malone on TTIP

            https://www.reverbnation.com/artist/video/16273773

            Its on the @wiki_ballot reverbnation page . embedded there from you tube.
            I use Bittube and Bittubers and have also been working on some other web 3 streaming platforms.

            RIght now there is a very important effort to avoid Brino this comment is very insightful I think

            Jan
            November 14, 2019 at 9:00 pm
            John the European super state was never meant to be a democracy. Look at the founding fathers in the Paneuropean Union the oldest European unification movement and the root of the EU. Count Richard Von Coudenhove-Kalergi, Crown Prince Otto von Habsburg and other names that are listed in the Almanach de Gotha. Their aim was/is the restoration of the old imperial structures in the form of a federal Europe, hence the creation of a toothless European parliament. The Paneuropean movement had the support of people like Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill who lauded the movement’s work for a unified Europe in his 1946 Zurich speech. In 1947 a group around Churchill, Duncan Sandys and Evard Benes split and the European Movement International was established. This movement rivals the Paneuropean Union which is more of a Christian Democratic nature but in essence has the same aims. In 2004 by the way the daughter of Otto Von Hapsburg, Walburga Habsburg Douglas married to a member of the Clan Douglas, Count Archibald Douglas became honorary President of the Intl. Paneuropean Union. So as this bit of history makes clear it was never the case of just walking away from Europe. The structure has gone up and the U.k. is part of it. A referendum was granted because of a miscalculation by the Bourgeois Boheme and now we are left in a muddle and none to vote for. We have now Tories 1 under Johnson and Tories 2 und Farage. The most likely outcome is remain outright or in stages. First Northern Ireland next Scotland and perhaps Wales and in the end England hoisting the white flag. Maybe I am wrong but I think Farage pulled the rug from under the Brexit movement.
            Best regards
            Jan
            https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2019/11/14/the-people-cannot-win-this-general-election-but-they-can-triumph-in-broxtowe/?unapproved=846259&moderation-hash=21a025f17b69f0a78cc5b569d9d91cf8#comment-846259

  21. A fantastic comment by Jacob. Re: the feeling of “being at home”…that nails it. My country (I am liberal, in the US) does not feel like my home. The tragedies I see coming down the track (I’m in the US pre-mid-terms election) are dreadful. How can history NOT repeat? When we discuss having rational debate – how can you have rational debate when absolute, unvarnished lies and social media brainwashing is occurring and are a strategic tactical weapon? Are we obligated to have rational debate under those circumstances? I found this statement to be the most accurate: Often enough you have a choice. You just have to choose on time. How many times does civilization “choose” after thousands of deaths, millions of lives tortured, minds ruined – by being late. To always act after history has occurred, full of grief and chagrin.

    What is the point of prevention? We do it on a micro scale. Why do we wear seat belts, eat right, check references, etc etc. Because it is in our direct control. In the macro societies, there is always a political solution to bemoan; the bland and bloodless committee who produce only reliable profits and rule, with favored privilege and wealth as a byproduct. The autocrat/narcissist rapacious strongman who rules with an iron hand, with no conscience. Our leaders rise, be they with charisma and promises, or with training and boring skills, or with killing and fear by mob rule.

    If the point of this blogpost is to enlighten us to our inborn biases and reactions, and our need to recognize them first, then yes, I see it – if we are operating in a rational society. I think humanity has still not been able to overcome it’s tribalism, it’s corruption, it’s graft, it’s tendency to resort to the id, the primitive and the machinations thereof. I love your discussion, but meanwhile, it is now Nov 2022. Rome is burning.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published.