A mad, minority approach to capitalism is being fostered by the misuse of media made more diverse and effective by technology. Confusion and doubt are sown through false witness and Mammon’s mouthpieces. The result has been a catastrophic division of the Resistance, and the passive acceptance of the status quo by frustrated and time-starved strugglers in the working population. The Slog analyses why and how this happened, and asks – with increasing concern – whether the will is there to stop the process.
The Slog is six years old this year. The name is short for Bollockslog…a log of bollocks being fed to us in a constant stream for one reason or another: blind ideology, fiscal scams, internet fraud, political gain and so forth. From time to time since, I’ve posted stuff that ends with the acronym Iabato! – it’s all bollocks and that’s official. This is a potted history laid out for the benefit of newer readers. It is succinct – dare I say even elegantly simple. Nothing else in contemporary life is…and that reality is destroying our freedoms.
Over those six years, three fundamental changes have occurred in the nature of bollocks. First and most obviously, it is almost ubiquitous today. Second, it gets increasingly puerile, superficial, easy to deconstruct and predictable with every week. And finally, it has moved on from being what I would call ‘useful’, short term bollocks to the construction of detailed, pernicious and rigidly observed ‘absolute truth’ bollocks, the doubting of which gets one labelled as an NVE (non-violent extremist) by governments, or “a sicko” by rabid blogger disciples.
The NVE thing is ironically apt in that it is of course itself complete bollocks: a citizen who holds contrarian views but never attacks things/people cannot by definition be an extremist. He or she might be a radical, eccentric or a satirist, but there’s no law against that; in a liberal democratic society, the holding of minority views is not only tolerated, debate about those views isn’t encouraged enough. Every majority starts off as a minority – it’s the way a healthy, self-renewing democracy works.
When The Slog started out, its main target was muddled bollocks: phrases and words mainly, under the general heading of feminist and ‘liberal’ pc. These included multiculturalism, peace dividend, Arab Spring, Peace flotilla, rainbow of sexuality, at the centre of Europe, rape thought, Islamophobia, hate crime and all the rest of the separation drift that eventually resulted in a messy divorce from reality.
In 2015, the bollocks spectrum is more fiscal, media, geopolitical and economic in nature: QE, Zirp, austerity for growth, aspirational equality, immaterial perjury, our long term plan is working, deficit surplus, libertarian Marxist, setting aside, electoral mistakes, war on terror, bad bank, bailin template, he groomed a nation, level playing field and so forth.
Once a domain almost entirely populated by fluffies, the Land of Let’s Pretend has undergone a massive lebensraum expansion spearheaded by sociopaths. The wishfully unthinking make-believe of the Left now has little more than a Gaza Strip of gullibility: 90% of Loopyland territory is occupied by spooks, bureaucrats, neoliberals, fundamentalists, bankers, media moguls, judges, policemen, and senior politicians answerable largely to corporate and military lobbyists.
In 2010, Harriet Harman’s archaic ideas were at worst tedious and at best hilarious. In 2015, Boris Johnson’s plans are at best socially vicious and at worst geopolitically dangerous.
In 2008, The Slog named this odd couple as the two biggest threats to democracy in Britain. Harman herself realised quite quickly that she was unelectable: having been the eminence rose behind Ed Miliband, I suspect her career is over. BoJo is made of different stuff; his rise to dictatorial power is only just beginning.
If ‘dictatorial power’ seems melodramatic, then I suggest people observe the MO of controlling neoliberal dissemblers in general, and Johnson himself in particular. US foreign policy execution and EU internal disciplinary processes are identical in their willingness to smear any opponent, tell any lie, break any law, change any régime, destroy any economy and kill any Spartacus in pursuit of the dominatory goals they and their globalist allies seek.
During his rise to popularity and prominence, London Mayor Boris Johnson has been caught at – or heavily suspected of – offering to have people beaten up, giving false electoral statistics, serially lying about the 2012 Olympics costs, falsifying taxi emission data, harassing residents in Olympia, conspiring with Newscorp executives to pervert Met Police investigations, blocking the progress of serious sexual offence enquiries, and destroying office recordings in City Hall. He has invested heavily in crowd control infrastructure, and brought dubious foreign money into London in such a manner as to suggest he thinks of the UK capital as some kind of tax haven/slave labour cross between the Cayman Isles and Singapore.
The progress of ruthless disinformation has been accelerated by two factors: the deliberate sowing of confusion – producing divisiveness among the questioning classes; and the apathetic ignorance of the mass of citizens…a condition given life by, variously, desperation, tiredness, media distraction and smug acquiescence. Again with heavy irony, elements as diverse as David Cameron and the Huffington Post have tried to frame the investigation of so-called ‘false flag’ obfuscation as “madcap conspiracy theory”.
The accusations were made at the same time as security services across the West indulged in deliberately fostering doubt by the application of red paint to herrings, and various massive frauds proved that many conspiracy theories were fact. Notable examples of those included the shooting down of planes over Ukraine, Libor rigging, gold market manipulation, Iranian currency destruction, CIA-backed fantasy accusations against Viktor Orban, ClubMed debt bond rates and false climate change data. In a neatly self-fulfilling circle, doubts about stock market ‘glitches’ are quoted as prime examples of non-violent extremism.
Seemingly plausible data to back one case exists alongside equally compelling ‘proof’ in favour of its antithesis. This has played a major role in the creation on the Web of intense subject matter about which there is no debate, just hurled abuse…so certain is each ‘army’ that it is right: paedophilia accusations, events in Ukraine, global warming, 9/11, Greek debt, derivative bets….on and on the list goes. And if anything or anyone penetrates the cover of dry ice, swarms of paid trolls are on hand to claim the existence of invented fact.
I continue to believe passionately that obsession with the pros and cons of each case is a massive waste of effort by the Resistance. For one thing, whether we like it or not, some conspiracy theories show conclusively that the Truth is not Out There. From Jack the Ripper onwards – via Anna Andersen, the Loch Ness Monster, the Grassy Knoll, faked Apollo Moonflights and AIDS as a deliberately developed virus – most widely believed conspiracies have been shown scientifically to be complete hokum. But more importantly, the destruction of trust in ‘news’ has as its prime objective the creation of permanent doubt.
For doubt produces indecision, debate begets ennuie, and uncertainty produces acceptance.
Perhaps the best example of acceptance and its adverse effects is the austerity policy of George Osborne. The one blatant fact at the core of this scam – that austerity savings are homoaeopathic compared to bank bailout costs and national debt maintenance costs – has been smudged, moved, covered and falsified to such an extent now that deficit is seen as debt, and budget surplus as the repayment of that debt. Jobs created, hours worked, wages earned and unemployment levels have been compared, cross-analysed, dissected and charted until doubt is created, fatigue kicks in, and TV interviews leave the audience more confused than they were before.
But the effect between supporters of UKip, Labour, the Greens and LibDems was once more the fruitless mutual trashing of this or that interpretation or detail, and a disastrous splintering of the anti-neoliberal vote. The Conservatives won a majority in their own right at the 2015 General Election because nobody took the simple decision among a diverse Opposition to stick to the one central fraud of Osborne’s policy. They failed to do this because of the mutual enmity forged between those for or against the complexity of climate change data, Green radicalism, immigration statistics, housing needs and economic diversification….all of which impact in one form or another upon fiscal and economic policy.
Those ‘consultants’ advising western politicians on the subject of election communications strategy have made the fatal mistake of combating the confusion sown with slogans that score well in research and simplify. Thus we got the bland ‘A better plan’ from Labour – but still with the general doubt remaining that neither Miliband nor his methodologically dense Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls had a plan at all, let alone a better one.
Ultimately, the biggest single contributor to the success of plausible bollocks is the ability of digital technology to fragment and multiply media formats, while still enabling ownership of those media to remain in very few hands. In this context, Net Neutrality itself is now under severe threat from the fat controllers. A debate barely understood by any outside the wonk community, NN is in fact a very simple threat: if the forces of media invention and confusion are offered a reception and diffusion service for ‘information’ faster then the independent Resistance, then Harry Truman’s old metaphor will become literal reality: a lie will go round the world before the Truth gets its pants on.
Equally, the biggest single mistake made by ideologically driven educationalists after 1980 was to eschew the traditional importance of, and value placed upon, a thirst for knowledge itself and an ability to think for oneself about the interpretation of the knowledge gained. Instead, Thatcher, New Labour and now Camerlot have stuck with brainless process, syllabus obsession, and the bureaucracy of pointless achievement targets.
The willingness to be a rebel drives change. The tolerance of rebels nurtures progress. By contrast, the smearing, framing and rigid exclusion of mavericks and their ideas produces an intolerant and increasingly dictatorial stagnation. We see this in both US Parties, in the German CDU, in the eurogroupe ‘reform’ mantra, in the British Labour Party – and above all in the disgraceful burial alive of the real facts about Greek indebtedness and its root cause, banker psychopathy.
The Bollocks Culture has indeed come of age. It has chosen to slay its estranged twin Fearless Journalism with the flapping jawbones of a million assholes. For every decent human being on the planet, this easily outstrips any other threat to freedom in the entire history of our species.
Politicians are never going to counter that threat because they have been turned by the Body Snatchers, and because they think in 4-5 year cycles. To get real change, we need to take the donation money and lobbying out of politics, take the politics out of health and education, and demonstrate the online power of the Decent Resistance.
I’ve been saying this for six years. I am getting nowhere. Discuss.
The Slog 