Re: Bad news for Brexit Junkies! - worse news for Labour and remainers
. Indeed ... accompanied by the 'Smirky McSmirk Face' that dominates all mainstream media analysis in the UK On 16 October 2018 at 20:32, Ariston Theotocopulos < ariston.theotocopu...@gmail.com> wrote: > This is all true, you could add that the UK news media delights in > spreading lies, it does it purely for the lulz. > > But... In 2016 only political lunatics had strong opinions one way or > another on the EU, and nobody here thought that there would be any > significant change whatever the result of the referendum - these two > things together practically guaranteed a leave result. > > In retrospect, the real historic vote in 2016 was the vote for Boaty > McBoatface, this was the template for the 2016 referendum, and the > 2017 general election. Those people singing 'Oh Jeremy Corbyn' were > not a cult (as the Guardian ludicrously claimed), they did it because > it wound up all the right people. > > In the future, all elections will re-elect Boaty McBoatface. > > -Ariston > > On Tue, 16 Oct 2018 at 14:55, James Wallbank wrote: > > > > (1) The "United Kingdom" is not a nation state as Europe knows it. It's > > actually a shrunken, dwarf empire. > > > > (2) Areas outside the Southeast (both the nations: Wales, Scotland and > > Northern Ireland) the Regions (The Midlands, The North, The South West) > > and the unrecognised nations (Cornwall, Mercia, Northumbria) are > > effectively colonies under occupation by London. London has total, full > > spectrum dominance over the national narrative. > > > > (3) Britain is suffering from a kind of post-imperial psychosis. > > > > (4) Britain is notable in being the only European nation to have failed > > to rid itself of hereditary rulers. Of the 250 or so Dukes in Britain > > (that's the highest level of the aristocracy outside royalty) around 180 > > of them still own the land that their ancestors owned just after the > > Norman Conquest. That represents nearly 1000 years of occupation. They > > will stop at NOTHING to retain their hidden power. > > > > (5) Britain's manifestly defective parliamentary system is really window > > dressing, that conceals other centres of power. > # distributed via : no commercial use without permission > #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: > -- Bronaċ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Bad news for Brexit Junkies! - worse news for Labour and remainers
Hi Ted, I'd suggest that the lack of education in media literacy and critical literacy are the key things which have rendered the UK population vulnerable to the sorts of rhetoric-based exploits that you identify. I recall in the 1980s and 1990s, educationalists persistently identified the need for these literacies, to enable citizens to navigate the electronic media environment. Persistently, these calls for education were marginalised, ignored, or transformed into "online safety" training. The component of critical analysis was entirely dumped. To understand just how bizarre the political situation is in the UK, it's worth reflecting on who is a member of the Conservative Party, which has ruled for the majority of the last century. Apologies in advance for the excessive emphasis: THE AVERAGE AGE OF A MEMBER OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY IS NOW MORE THAN 70 YEARS OLD. Yes, you read that right. Average. 70. To make matters even more bizarre, the Conservative Party now benefits more from bequests than it does from membership fees. The nation is literally being ruled by the Party of the Dead. Is it any wonder that it is reactionary? Best Regards, James = On 16/10/2018 17:24, tbyfield wrote: On 16 Oct 2018, at 9:54, James Wallbank wrote: Well, quite clearly I'm beginning to sound like a member of the tinfoil hat brigade - but seriously, the level of democratic failure and delusional thinking at the highest levels of governance are hard to explain in other ways. I agree with your analysis in spirit, but all of those things were true when the UK joined the EU — so it doesn't do do much to explain why this and why now? The nihilistic turn that many established nations are taking is maddening because it's hard to tell whether the driving forces are structural or, instead, if we're seeing the resurgence of the 'great man' model of history (yes, peanut gallery, I know this lot isn't very 'great'). In theory, those two ways of thinking about society are radically different; in practice, they seem to be converging. A handful of people who fancy themselves great have fumbled and maneuvered their way into positions, political and discursive, that allow them to seize — or maybe 'surf' — structural forces. The fact that they're jabbering, sophistical narcissists is all the more frustrating, because anyone with a shred of optimism left would think those personal qualities would make it impossible to rise to such power. And yet we also know that those personal qualities are ideally suited to key aspects of how media works now, again ranging from the structural (for example, the temporal model of 24/7 constant-coverage media machines) to the personal (Rupert Murdoch and his ilk). So what we're seeing isn't just a collapse of the national regimes, we're also seeing the collapse of an epistemic regime that was tied to the heyday of — and depended on — those national regimes to establish facts. People like to cite that chestnut about everyone gets their own opinion but not their own facts, but *in fact* what we're seeing is a rising world in which people *do* get to have their own facts — for a while. The first question is for how long, and second is what comes next? In the US the concern is that the GOP under Trump is assembling a one-party state at an alarming rate. Much of the basic work had already been done before Trump came along, and his forces are now mainly connecting the dots. The result may well be a governmental regime that's adept at manufacturing its own facts on a just-in-time basis — basically shoving crazy short-term noise into media pipelines and networks in order to dominate both *how* things are 'framed' (bleh) and *what* is framed — 'content' (even more bleh). In practice, this relies heavily on subverting the segments of the government whose strength has been that they moved *slowly*: the technocratic and procedural layers of the executive branch, fact-finding mechanisms of the legislative branch, and the analytical authority of the judicial branch. Given the right conjunction — autocratic leaders, solipsistic ruling parties, minority parties in thrall to institutionalism and good manners, and judiciaries systematically subverted over decades — this has been surprisingly to accomplish within individual countries. But this turn involves several (maybe many) countries, which is where it gets really messy. It's hardly worth mentioning the importance of the community of nations to restrain individual countries' excesses, but what happens when these nihilists start to cooperate? We're seeing that all over the place: cabals meeting here, theaters of the absurd there, shadowy influence networks playing next-level jurisdictional games with data, employees, processing. Again, that's not new: for example, the homogenization of politicians and campaigns was clear in the '80s, and the rise of multinational news systems like News C
the rising costs of denial
I think one of the major drivers of the collapse of the political center
and the rise of the far right across the globe, across widely differing
contexts, is the collective inability to deal with the reality of
climate change.
The political center -- with with its post-democratic commitment to
science, technology, numbers and experts -- cannot the deny the reality
of climate change, both in terms of immediate experience (very year,
were are all witnessing numerous, well-reported
"once-in-a-hundred-years" climatic events), and in terms of predictions
that become more dire every year.
But the centrist actors are too corrupt to translate this
acknowledgement of impeding catastrophe into any action. By corrupt, I
don't mean only classic corruption, like the various scandals
de-legitimizing political parties in Brazil, but also structural and
institutional corruption such as the way US politics is dependent on
private money, or the way the German government is subservient to its
major industries.
In some ways, the German example is the most shocking, because Germany
is a relatively well-run country, with comparatively decent media, still
somewhat functioning political parties, lots of money, expertise and a
stated political commitment to energy transition ("Energiewende"). But
even here, politics is unwilling to confront well-documented criminal
activities of its key industry. Which has been caught manipulating
emission caps and, in effect, polluting the entire population with all
the associated health consequences that are well known. The scope of
this scandal and the weakness of the grand coalition to address it is
hard to underestimate.
What the political center is effectively communicating is that they know
the problems but they cannot, or don't want to, act to solve them:
"We're doomed, but we cannot do anything about it, please vote for us."
This is hardly an appealing proposition and it's not surprising people
don't fall for it. And all of this in the name of reason and realism.
The far right never cared about reason and realism, and it's answer to
the problem of climate change is to simply deny its existence all
together. Not the least because the unmitigated exercise of state power
against the "other", the core political recipe of the far right, is
irrelevant here.
But compared to the center -- which acknowledges the problem without
addressing it -- the far-right is consistent, it denies the existence of
the problem so that fact that it cannot address becomes irrelevant.
There is a quote floating around, usually attributed to Nietzsche but
never sourced, that "people choose bad meaning over no meaning" and to
some degree, this far-right offers bad meaning, while the center offers
no meaning, and the left barely exist beyond the grassroots and the city
level.
But the costs of denying the obvious are rising as the right needs to go
to ever more extreme measures to continue its approach. Science is being
de-funded and discredited (at a time, when China is investing
massively), government agencies are handed over to lobbyists
hell-bent on gutting and dismantling them, or they create fake events
such as the never-ending panic over immigration, or Brexit. And what
will be next? War?
This denial even is part of what makes the strange coalition between
ethno-nationalists and globalized financial elites work in the first
place. They both live well with it. While the ethno-nationalists prepare
for unrest through borders and militarizing the police, the financiers
are preparing to ride out the storm on their own private island, guarded
by global mercenaries, or better yet, robots.
--
http://felix.openflows.com
|OPEN PGP: https://pgp.key-server.io/search/0x0BBB5B950C9FF2AC
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
# distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
