Tag: corporatism

Going with the flow against the Old World Order

Post author By neilg63
Post date 15th July 2018
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The affluent professional classes, along with their army of assorted victim groups and infantile self-righteous student types, have set it upon themselves to amplify the mainstream media's disapproval of leading proponents of the old world order of nation states, two-parent families and cohesive communities with shared values. Three weeks ago we saw a large demonstration against the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum with a sea of blue twelve-star flags. Our trendy elitists wanted to vent their anger at those who tricked the English and Welsh working classes into rejecting their beloved European superstate. This week they gathered to oppose a caricature of the US President.

Don't get me wrong, there are many good reasons for protesting the excesses of US imperialism with its endless series of destabilising proxy wars. However, I cannot remember any large demos specifically against the presence of former US presidents with the possible exception of small impromptu protests against George W. Bush. Before Donald J Trump entered the White House global media giants in North America and Europe supported the purported leader of the free world. Now they welcome colourful processions of virtue-signallers opposed not so much to US-led wars, but to the spectre of outmoded nationalism, which rather perversely US foreign policy has done much suppress over the last 70 years. Just over 2 years ago President Obama urged us to support the EU, while his administration armed and funded Islamic fundamentalists in Syria to break up one of the oldest countries in the Middle East.

Alas our motley crew of professional whingers expressed their disapproval of the President's alleged phobias against people of other races, creeds, sexual orientations, gender identities and disability statuses. Most notably they took a stand against his support for strong borders. Yet when Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, visited 10 Downing Street as an official guest of Her Majesty's government, we saw only muted protests. His regime not only jails homosexuals and stones adulterous women, it has singularly failed to accommodate nearby Syrian refugees while bombing North Yemen. By contrast Trump presides over one of the most ethnically diverse and tolerant nations on earth, which, unlike Britain, can truly claim to have been built on successive waves of immigration, but has traditionally expected its new citizens to embrace their new American cultural identity. However, we now live in an age of hypermobility, instant communication and, by any fair historic standards, generous welfare provision. The United States, despite its vast expanses, has a limited capacity for absorbing the tens of millions of immigrants who would love to live the American dream. 350 million US residents still consume more than Africa, India and China combined. The open-borders brigade effectively urge millions of opportunists to bypass legal migration routes, open mainly to talented professionals, and demand access to the US labour market and public services just as big business is investing heavily in smart automation. How are we supposed to tackle climate change and our overreliance on imported goods, if we welcome the mass movement of human beings from regions with relatively low per-capita consumption to countries where most of life's necessities are shipped from hundreds or thousand of miles away to warehouses and supermarkets?

Far from bringing about a more egalitarian and harmonious world, mass migration tends to exacerbate existing social divides creating more competition and rivalry among the underclasses. More important as Robert D. Putnam has amply documented after extensive fieldwork, culture clashes brought about by rapid demographic changes weaken social trust largely to the detriment of the weakest in society.

Ethnic diversity is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration. In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits. In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to 'hunker down'. Trust (even of one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration." E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture.

The most successful examples of peaceful and prosperous social democracies are all compact nation states with low levels of migration and a high degree of ethnic conformity (i.e. newcomers have to adapt to their new homeland and not vice versa). Bernie Sanders loves to cite Scandinavia as a model. Of course he meant Sweden, Denmark and Norway in 1970s, 80s and 90s long before mass migration transformed neighbourhoods and led to the creation of parallel communities that barely interact, necessitating an expansion of social surveillance and restrictions on the personal freedoms that Scandinavians cherish. The professional classes have hardly noticed because they have benefited most from recent economic trends. All over Europe the remnants of the traditional working classes are abandoning the social democratic parties that presided over the post-WW2 social stability pact. In Italy the heirs to the old Communist Party rebranded as the Democratic Party who once attracted over 35% of the vote have fallen below 20% in recent polls. The same trend has occurred in Germany where Martin Schulz's SPD has sunk below the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) and in Sweden the Swedish Democrats, which the mainstream media smears as the anti-migration far-right, are now ahead of the Social Democrats in the polls with the affluent professional classes often opting for the Greens instead. The latter group promise a clean and tolerant world devoid of ethnic conflict or extreme inequality. Their only recipe is to tax the very multinationals they claim to oppose rendering us all slaves to the likes of Amazon and Bayer-Monsanto.

Tags capitalism, communism, corporatism, immigration, limits to growth, migration, Power dynamics, war

Power Dynamics

The Net Contribution Myth

Post author By neilg63
Post date 14th July 2018
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Inconvenient fact: Total Public spending is £23 thousand per worker

This is quick one, but the subject keeps coming up in discussions about working parents, welfare dependency and mass migration. Yes, I know any mention of the last subject will put off many readers and ring alarm bells about potentially xenophobic rants, but the claim made repeatedly by various self-defined progressive opinion leaders is that young mothers and new immigrants contribute more in tax than they consume in services. Now we could have many other arguments about motherhood and sustainable migration that address the human aspects of these issues, such as children's need for a strong bond with their biological parents, a mother's desire to enjoy her children's early years or the social and environmental effects of rapid migratory flows. Nobody doubts these are not simple black and white issues, though many would pretend they are so they can shut down rational debate. Here I will focus more on the economic aspects.

First economic growth does not necessarily improve our quality of life once we have met our basic needs and staved off the scourges of malnutrition and extreme hardship. To live long, happy, rewarding and meaningful lives we do not always need more money or more high-status consumer goods, but better social integration, greater personal independence and above all a sense of purpose in life. Just because the economy is growing does not mean people are happier or feel more fulfilled. It just implies a growing money supply, often brought about by monetising services that people used to offer for free to loved ones. Consider motherhood. Until relatively recently, in most two parent families the mother would stay at home to bring up her children. Somehow the family would make ends meet with the father's salary alone at least until the kids started school. Often married women would work part-time, especially in the caring professions. Longer life spans, lower infant mortality, smaller family sizes and domestic appliances have opened up more opportunities for mothers. By the 1960s and 70s women were no longer confined to monotonous housework and child rearing duties, but we still accepted the biological reality that only women can bear children and are thus best suited to the important task of shaping the next generation. This doesn't mean fathers cannot play an important role too or that in some situations the father, rather than the mother, cannot stay at home to look after his children or take it in turns with his wife. The good news is with the advent of smart automation and shorter working weeks, both mothers and fathers could have much more time on their hands to dedicate either to vocational creativity or their cherished offspring, all without redefining human nature. So if a modern mother wants to write a novel or design clothes on her computer, with modern technology she can literally have the best of both worlds. However, if she opts to work over 40 hours a week in a physically or intellectually demanding high-stress job such as a nuclear physicist, bioscientist or software engineer, then she'll need someone else to take care of her children. As these professions attract high salaries, it may make economic sense for women in such situations to choose their careers over their children. Some lucky professionals may have loving partners or available relatives who can provide their offspring with all the care and attention young children crave with a little mummy time at the weekends or in the evenings. However, in the real world most jobs are pretty uninspiring and only attract modest pay packets. Would you give up your spiritually rewarding role as a loving mother of young children to work in a call centre or the marketing department of a major brand on little more than the average wage which is still around £28,000? If families had to foot the bill for all additional childcare and transportation services required to let mothers of young children go to work full-time, it may not be worth it at all. Do you really want your babies and toddlers to end up in a crowded creche or nursery eight hours a day without any personalised attention from someone who really has their best interests at heart? Can you afford a dedicated childminder and house cleaner on your modest salary? The fact is without state subsidies you cannot. Half-decent childcare services can easily set you back £400 - £1000 a month. Once you factor in the additional costs of transport and all the stress involved, it simply isn't worth it. If we monetised motherhood in crude economic terms, considering the benefits of dedicated early parenting for a child's future, as proven by countless sociological studies, this life-changing role should merit a top salary. If you want your child to succeed in life and compete in a labour market requiring higher and higher minimum levels of analytical intelligence, rearranging your career ambitions for a few years to act as a full-time parent will help much more than short-term concerns about your income.

Now let us consider the economics of mass migration to a small country with a large settled population and a high rate of youth under-employement. While the UK has much lower youth unemployment than most Southern European countries, millions of young adults have unrewarding part-time temporary jobs with limited career prospects. Today most under 30 year-olds have yet to embark on a career that can guarantee their livelihood till their reach the age of retirement. The government has shrewdly concealed the true scale of youth worklessness by promoting expensive university education and through the proliferation of zero-hours contracts and part-time jobs. If you've graduated in business management or media studies, you probably don't want to work in adult day care or food processing. As a result ever since the then Labour government allowed people from the EU's new member states to seek work with full in-work welfare benefits in the UK, many of the entry-level jobs that English, Scottish and Welsh youngsters used to do are now dominated by transient migrant labour. We hear regularly how the NHS would grind to a halt without unrestricted levels of migrant workers from the rest of Europe. Yet the UK population is not ageing as fast as in most Southern European countries. Many recall Tony Blair's slogan of education, education, education, yet only 6 years later mass migration lobbyists bemoaned the poor writing and number-crunching skills of the products of the British education system. If you listen to some Guardian reading professionals grumbling about ignorant white trash, you'd seriously think they believed the native underclasses are somehow genetically inferior, incapable of emptying bed pans, cleaning toilets, picking fruit or serving coffee. Naturally left-leaning Guardian readers always find a way of blaming the Tories, without admitting that the scourges of welfare dependency, single parenthood and Mickey Mouse degrees with little practical application have condemned millions of working class Britons to a life of welfare dependency. Yet the Guardian seems to think the solution is yet more welfare, more mental health screening and more abstract education. The last thing they want is for young people to set up their own small businesses offering all the services the chattering classes take for granted. Whatever happened to sixteen year old school leavers learning practical trades like plumbers, car mechanics or electricians on the job possibly attending college part-time before setting up their own businesses in their early twenties? Instead they learn at school that they should always call an approved professional from a reliable company with appropriate insurance and compliant with a zillion health and safety regulations, whenever they encounter a technical fault.

How much do we cost the government?

For all the hype about austerity we hear from the left-branded establishment media, by which I mean Channel 4, the BBC and Guardian, UK government spending stood in 2016-17 at a whopping £780 billion. Considering a total population of 66 million and a working population of 33 million, that's just under £12,000 per person or around £23,600 per worker. Of course, income tax and its close companion, national insurance, only account for around half of government revenue (30% income tax and nearly 20% national insurance). Moreover, the top 25% of earners pay around 75% of all income tax and the top 1% alone account for over 25% of income tax revenue. The remainder comprises mainly various sales duties, council tax and corporation tax, paid by the UK's growing army of contract workers as well as by small and medium businesses, but tenaciously avoided by big enterprises. However, if your total gross income is £28 thousand, you cannot possibly pay your share of £23 thousand even if you squander your meagre earnings on booze and perfume. To break even you'd need to earn way more than £40 grand a year. Over the last decade we've seen a hollowing out of the middle income group. In most of the Southeast of England, a salary of just £40 thousand is very unattractive if you aspire to buy a house. At this income level you literally have the worst of the both worlds. You earn too much to be entitled to working family tax credits, housing benefits etc. and too little to get a mortgage on a modest 3 bedroom house. You will end up spending over £1000 a month on rent alone plus exorbitant commuting expenses. Worse still you could be homeless within a few months if you lose your temporary job. For some time now the economy has simply not added up, with most adults in a perpetual cycle of debt and borrowing subsidised by state handouts.

How can these very logical figures diverge so radically from the oft-quoted statistics showing that immigrants are net contributors to the exchequer? The answer is simple: by only taking into account some services and assuming much higher spending for vulnerable citizens such as the elderly, disabled and long-term unemployed from disadvantaged backgrounds. Such statistics do not take into account additional spending for policing, social services, transport infrastructure, waste management, town-planning, defence, administration etc. all of which increase in line with the population both in terms of size and complexity. By far the biggest cost for most UK residents is housing, especially if you live near property hotspots such as London, Bristol or Edinburgh. This is conveniently excluded from the Retail Price Index that the government uses to calculate inflation and is, as such, a fiction. If house building fails to keep up with rising demand, property prices will inevitably rise over and above their natural level determined by other market forces. Before 2004, most EU migrants contributed more on average than home-bred UK citizens of the same age group. It's easy to understand why. As West European countries all have comparable salary levels (though still lower in Southern Europe) and welfare provision, working abroad appealed mainly to the well-motivated and better educated looking to enhance their career prospects, improve their English or experience a different country. Some married British nationals or just felt disenchanted with their home region, but by and large migration within the EU remained relatively balanced, although many more British pensioners retired to Spain than vice versa and many more Italians and Spaniards worked as waiters in London than Brits in Spain or Italy. Then recruiting agencies decided to hire directly from Eastern Europe bringing in over a million malleable workers willing to endure short-term hardships to boost their earning potential.

Successive UK governments had abandoned the descendants of their native working classes who once powered the industrial engine that enabled Great Britain conquer over a fifth of the planet's landmass and rule the waves. If youngsters could not adapt to the new precarious service-oriented economy of banking, insurance, marketing and media, they often found the practical manual jobs of their fathers' era had been outsourced, automated or assigned to temporary agency workers. Meanwhile family breakdowns and the rise in single-parent households saw a dramatic decline in self-reliance and a poor work ethic. Employers would often complain that they had tried to hire local youngsters to work in their meat-packing factory or electronic gadget warehouse, but they turned up late and were ill-disciplined. This common perception is only half true, but the point is; whom should we blame? Are native Britons genetically inferior to their Eastern European cousins? If this were the case, why has the laziness bug spread to the descendants of 1950s and 60s immigrants ? By failing to address the long-term problems of under-employment and lack of ambition among many young Britons, the government has allowed a growing proportion of the population to depend on welfare handouts and get sucked into the growing mental health system.

Surely a government's job is to manage the economy and regulate big business in such a way as to let its people stand on their own two feet and fulfil their ambitions without unduly restricting their personal freedom or allowing unjustifiably unethical and/or exploitative practices. This dream can only work a high-skill economy where employers values workers for their creative and intellectual talent rather than as numbers on a spreadsheet.

Tags capitalism, communism, corporatism, Power dynamics, sustainability

Power Dynamics

How to spot an Élitist

or rather how to spot their sycophants.

There is a certain category of pseudo-intellectual whose views are utterly predictable, though this subspecies of mildly affluent trendy lefties may come in a variety of shapes, sizes and intelligence levels. In an insular British context we might refer to this group loosely as Guardian readers, the kind of people who look down disparagingly on unenlightened tabloid readers, but yet also claim to stand up for the downtrodden, especially those who belong to identifiable victim groups. They also regularly fall for mainstream fake news about our rulers' hate figures, hence fanciful conspiracy theories about collusion between Putin, Assad, Nigel Farage, Julian Assange and Tommy Robinson, currently behind bars much to the delight of media pundits.

Predictable metro-élitists beliefs:

Thinks Free will is an illusion. Your thoughts and behaviours are a result of millions of years of genetic and cultural evolution. Therefore, we can dismiss any inconvenient opinions that do not suit our preferred narrative as mental illnesses, ignorance or backwardness. If you enter into a long debate with an elitist, just ask if they believe in free will and personal responsibility. Logically democracy and individual liberty are meaningless without free will. If you don't know what's good for you, why should we care what you think?
Advocates more proactive mental health intervention. When loosely defined nobody could disagree with the importance of nurturing our spiritual as well as our physical wellbeing. Nobody wants to be unhappy or dysfunctional. Whenever you hear talking heads blether endlessly about mental health , what they really mean is the psychiatrisation of the human condition, so that any behaviour or belief at odds with the new orthodoxy can be categorised as some sort of personality disorder. This is really a variant of the above, but watch out for key phrases typical of elitists, "That's just your opinion", "That sounds like a conspiracy theory" or "Have you read XYZ report published in XYZ official journal which refutes your ill-informed anecdotal evidence?". In short your political views are a mental illness and your experience is worthless.
Claims to oppose racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and, of course, Islamophobia and to champion the rights of vulnerable disabled people. No self-respecting elitist would want to openly express any prejudice on grounds of race, ethnicity, sexuality, biological sex, gender identity, religion, physical or mental disability status. However, that's just a rhetorical device to shut down debate on a wide range of far-reaching social issues that affect not just our sense of identity within previously viable societies, but also our very humanity. What they really mean is that a only minuscule intellectual elite may express any opinions on these subjects. The rest of us are apparently simply too stupid.
Loves fertility clinics. Why have Western elites embraced the LGBTQ+ agenda with such a passion and championed the fertility rights of other groups unable to procreate naturally or raise their children unassisted, while simultaneously introducing invasive measures to spy on traditional two-parent families? In short they do not trust ordinary people to raise the next generation. Fertility clinics and social services transfer responsibility away from families and close-knit communities to the state and biotech businesses. Fertility clinics also pave the way for enhanced biogenetic services available only to professional elites and compliant prospective parents vetted by social services. Such prenatal intervention could not only exclude genetic markers for many diseases and lifelong disabilities, but also insert DNA sequences associated with superior intelligence, physical strength or longevity. While fertility treatment is still very much in its infancy, CRISPR (a weird acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat) will soon set the stage for the divergence of natural homo sapiens sapiens and genetically enhanced humanoids.
Loves mass migration. Doesn't everyone want a second home in the Mediterranean or Caribbean, affordable childminders and plumbers, a wide choice of restaurants and the chance to participate in international professional and academic exchanges? Rhetorically, self-proclaimed progressives love to champion the rights of new migrant communities, while besmirching the more conservative sections of the settled population. Damned angry nativists! Another common tactic is to claim that we've always had such a high level of immigration or to downplay its extent and cultural impact, often moaning about the lack of ethnic diversity in cultural backwaters like Hull or vast tracts of seemingly empty countryside just waiting to be culturally enriched by new housing, roads, shopping malls, wind-farms, sewage treatment facilities, hospitals, mosques, gay bars, robotised warehouses, office blocks and day-care centres.
Thinks ordinary people are stupid, unless we can be persuaded to support one of their progressive causes. If you happen to be a working class lad involved in a gay relationship, elitists will love you if faithfully join their LGBTQ++ awareness-raising campaigns, but they'll hate you if you campaign against the Islamisation of your neighbourhood because you do not feel safe to walk the streets at night with your boyfriend. If you happen to be a young woman wishing to embark on a career in neuroscience or software development, they will love you if you unite in their crusade against the patriarchy, but they will hate you if you don't want to share your changing room with transgender persons wielding male genitalia. Elitists see their favoured victim groups as pawns in a larger chess game to gain greater influence over our future society.
Always sides with global institutions like the European Union or the United Nations or with NGOs like Amnesty International or Oxfam. Trendy lefties, many of whom actually work for these institutions, may occasionally criticise them if they pander too much to populism or protectionism. If an elitist starts talking about reform, what they really mean is even faster cultural change, not listening and learning from the experiences of commoners, the kind of people who cannot afford exclusive properties away from the madding crowd.

Protagonists and Sycophants

Now you may reasonably complain that most trendy lefties are not really that privileged at all. Many struggle to pay their exorbitant rents in overcrowded metropolises, have to cope with traffic congestion and pollution on their cycle to work in chic advertising agencies, may have fallen victim to street crime and some have experienced genuine intolerance of their lifestyle choices from other sections of their diverse multicultural community. Logically their only explanations for such mishaps lie in a concentration of power and privilege in the old guard, the spectre of shortsighted nationalism and ignorant native underclasses buying into xenophobic propaganda from the sensationalist Tabloid press. Indeed any convoluted explanation for society's ills seems plausible unless enlightened opinion leaders can label it as in some way politically incorrect.

If you scratch beneath the surface of any middling Guardian reader, you'll find they're only marginally more successful than the much-maligned Lumpenproletariat (underclasses) and are only a few paycheques away from bankruptcy. If artificial intelligence can replace human lorry drivers or machinists, it can displace lowly graphic designers, accountants, solicitors and recruitment consultants too. Many university-educated professionals may soon join the ranks of the welfare-dependent underclasses. This may in part explain the rise of Corbynism in the UK and the popularity of Bernie Sanders in the US. Yet their one big idea is to use the proceeds of multinationals to bankroll a welfare panacea, which would in effect subjugate us completely to the hegemony of a handful of tech giants. The CEOs of Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, Tesla and Microsoft seem quite happy for social justice warriors to demand UBI (universal basic income) and more theoretical rights for all perceived victim groups, because they hold the technological keys to our Huxleyan future.

However, in some parts of the world we're beginning to see some overlap in the critiques of the disenfranchised native working classes and the disillusioned left. Both feel abandoned by the political classes and by global corporations. How long will it take for trendy lefties to realise they have more in common with ordinary working people who just want to defend the nation states and mixed economies that helped their parents prosper than with genuine global elitists hellbent on destroying such societies. When will it dawn on wishful-thinking hipsters that the global elites do not really care about their cherished victim groups and will be happy to sell them down the river just like they did with the native working classes of affluent Western countries? Just ten years ago trendy lefties hailed Polish migrants as hardworking taxpayers embracing the opportunities that globalisation provides. Today, some of the same progressive media pundits denounce Polish voters as myopic nationalists for failing to accommodate more North African migrants and find on many issues their darling migrant communities hold more socially conservative views. Yes your average senior project manager on a relatively comfortable salary of 80 to 100K (you need to earn that much to get mortgage on a modest house in SE England) may have more in common with former steelworkers from Port Talbot than they do with the likes of George Soros or Bill Gates. The Guardian readers of today may well be the disaffected has-beens of tomorrow, unable to adapt to a world that no longer needs their expertise or loyalty.

Tags anarchy, capitalism, communism, corporatism, hegemony, lobby, media, Power dynamics

Power Dynamics

Fakenews Overdrive

A mindset pervades the British chattering classes whether nominally on the right, centre or trendy left. One may debate strategy, priorities or even the niceties of ethics, but one may not question the BBC and by extension the other main news outlets and opinion leading institutions. To do so invites immediate ridicule. When I debate online with wishful thinking trendy lefties, they often discount any evidence that does not come from a narrow set of official sources. Essentially nothing is true unless an official fact checker has authenticated it. Not surprisingly, the British government has entrusted the venerable BBC to help impressionable school children spot fake news.

But what if the mainstream media, allied with a vast network of NGOs and psychological warfare specialists, were themselves major purveyors of fake news. At the very least the BBC has an institutional bias in favour of narratives that support the policy objectives of the most powerful corporate lobbies in the UK. This very suggestion is to many tantamount to heresy. Millions of us literally grew up with the BBC and learned to love its abundance of children's programmes, sitcoms, nature documentaries and dramas. Until recently in many households the telly dominated not just the living room, but accompanied family meals and evening relaxation. However, the BBC has long appealed much more to the aspirational and pseudo-intellectual middle classes, while commercial alternatives with their focus on sport and blockbuster movies have appealed more to the working classes. TV news producers know most spectators have a very short attention span. Reports are condensed to show sensational imagery interspersed with short interviews and followed by commentary by professional talking heads and selected eye witnesses. Few have the time or resources to verify whether footage of alleged chemical attacks is real or not. Few will investigate the funding of supposedly neutral humanitarian organisations on the ground. Over the last 7 years most TV viewers will have gleaned mainly that both Assad and ISIS are evil. An allegation gains credibility largely through endless repetition by multiple actors to give the illusion of a consensus. No doubt, most casual BBC viewers believe Bashar Al Assad has repeatedly deployed chemical weapons against civilians. The Syrian government has consistently denied ever using chemical weapons against civilians, and why would it with well-funded Western media operatives waiting to pounce on any hard evidence of such crimes. However, to millions of casual TV viewers such details don't matter. The short version is more war in the Middle East, more bad guys killing innocent civilians and an international community of progressive politicians seeking to punish war criminals on behalf of enlightened human rights activists. The only trouble is we've heard it all before over the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Syria. Ever since the fall of the former Soviet Union Western intervention has seldom succeeded in bringing about the kind of tolerant, liberal and democratic societies that our leaders promised. They may cite Croatia or Slovenia as success stories, but only after a decade-long civil war and much ethnic cleansing. Slovenia and Croatia succeeded only because they have a well-educated citizenry and an economy integrated with their neighbours, while Kosovo remains a hotbed for drug and people traffickers as well as Islamic extremists.

Naturally any media outlet with a distinctive bias can simply select real news stories that suit its agenda and ignore or downplay those that don't. However, sometimes our ruling elites need to manufacture consent for unpopular policies such as wars or mass surveillance by priming the collective psyche with the spectre of new threats or heinous enemies. Moreover, as the establishment still tolerates alternative media to provide the illusion of a freedom-loving democracy, it has to counter all challenges to its narrative.

Let us be clear no government can wage war without collateral damage or unintended civilian casualties, even if it can claim ethical superiority over its enemies or the war itself can be justified in terms of legitimate self-defence or to prevent atrocities on a much larger scale. The Middle East has long been riven by deep ethnic and religious conflicts, exacerbated by a problematic transition from centuries of Ottoman rule through temporary colonial occupation in the aftermath of the First World War, the artificial redrawing of the geopolitical map, overdependence on oil exports and a hundred years of heavy-handed meddling by the major Western imperial powers. No Middle East rulers have ever succeeded in emulating the kind of relaxed and tolerant liberal society that emerged in Western Europe after the Second World War. Back in the 1960s it may have seemed that Middle East would follow in the West's footsteps as the younger generation embraced more liberal values and cultural exchanges among the professional classes brought the civilisations closer. Alas the daydream of a better tomorrow did not last long. By the late 1970s the Lebanese civil war was in full flow and the autocratic Shah of Iran failed to contain resurgent Islamic fundamentalism with much appeal among the country's growing underclasses. While Western European countries succeeded at least partly in extending prosperity and opportunity to the downtrodden working classes through a blend of regulated free market economics and social welfare, a growing proportion of the Middle East's teeming masses were left behind while many in the educated elite fled to the West. In this context Syria remained a rare exception keeping alive the secular pan-Arab dreams of Egypt's former leader, Gamel Abdel Nasser, but in doing so the Baath administration had to suppress the lure of Islamic fundamentalist fuelled by foreign intervention. Most of the state-sanctioned atrocities attributed to what the BBC invariably calls the Assad Regime occurred in the late 1970s and early 80s at a time when the USA and UK trained the Mujahideen to counter the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Tolerant liberal democracies cannot thrive in the midst of civil wars with a complete breakdown in mutual respect and social trust. Neither can they flourish in a country with rapidly changing demographics without a sense of shared identity. The bleak reality many principled antiwar activists often to fail to recognise is the illiberal nature of Islam itself or rather its inability to follow Christianity by embracing the liberal enlightenment and individual freedom, preferring instead complete submission to holy scriptures. Many Muslim majority countries seemed destined to follow the West as late as the 1980s, but many have reverted to a more doctrinaire interpretation of Islamic teachings, leading to a widening gulf in mean fertility rates between Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Strict Islam champions collectivism and fails to reward diligence, creativity and personal responsibility. Unsurprisingly for decades the best and brightest from Islamic world have migrated to the West to escape the very religious extremism that is now growing in Muslim enclaves across Western Europe and parts of North America. Yet Western interventionism has not so much failed to stymie the growth of regressive Islam as it has positively fuelled it or as in the case of Afghanistan, Libya and Syria bankrolled it via Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrein.

The intellectual elites have long feared populism or mob rule, except when they can appeal to common emotions to persuade the public to back a rebranded elite. They believe commoners are too simple-minded to understand the complexities of macro-economics and long-term planning. In most elections we vote mainly on emotions. Thus the Great British public has traditionally favoured death penalty and strict immigration controls, but generally opposed military interventions that do not serve to defend national sovereignty. The only war since 1945 which enjoyed overwhelming public support in the UK was the 1982 reconquest of the Falkland Islands. Most Britons supported the first Gulf War in 1991 following Iraq's short-lived occupation of Kuwait, but mainly because the media presented it as a simple case of standing up to brutal dictators. Tony Blair attempted to rebrand military adventurism as humanitarian peacekeeping. However, as successive missions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya failed to yield the liberal panacea we had been promised, except a façade micromanaged by supranational bodies and NGOs, the Western public grew sceptical. A recent poll suggested as few as 25% of UK voters supported the recent airstrikes against Syria and I very much doubt many have the time or inclination to access alternative media or watch the much-maligned Russian news channel, RT.

Strange Alliances

It's a funny old world where leftwing antiwar activists, including those traditionally critical not only US Imperialism but of Israeli power, fall victim to the kind of censorship they believed reserved for rightwing zealots. Britain's hate speech laws have been used both against elderly Christians opposed to the perceived LGBTQ+ agenda and against Muslims critical of Zionism. Likewise anyone who counters the dominant Western narrative on Syria (that Assad and Russia are to blame for most atrocities and human rights abuses) is pretty much classed as Russian bots or Assad apologists, often likened to obnoxious Holocaust deniers. It hardly matters that the Islamic militias that the US and UK funded to overthrow Assad hate both Jews and Christians or that many on the new right, such as Katie Hopkins or Tommy Robinson, admire Israel. If you're a devout Muslim you could fall foul of hate speech laws for voicing your disapproval of homosexuality. Likewise if you're gay you could be arrested under the same legislation for criticising a religion that abhors your lifestyle. Indeed the only way not to get into trouble is to internalise a Guardianesque worldview of endless progress towards a better more tolerant tomorrow, in which not only do gays and Muslims love each other, but both are united in their condemnation of antisemitism and fully support the benevolent global institutions that seek to replace nation states with a fluid mosaic of vibrant ethnically mixed citadels. While the new expression of globalised multiculturalism has many colours and flavours, it only tolerates a very narrow worldview that trivialises genuine cultural differences in the name of postmodernist social engineering. Countries exist to help us reconcile these differences peacefully. If you want to listen to Beethoven's 5th Symphony at 3 o'clock in the morning, that's fine as long as you respect my need to sleep or enjoy alternative music. Hence we have houses with soundproofed walls and may use headphones to isolate sounds that others may not wish to hear. Your house, your rules. My house, my rules. The same is true of any civic spaces we have to share with our neighbours and fellow citizens. If you want to engage in activities that may infringe on the welfare, security or liberty of others, you should seek a special secluded venue with its own set of rules and customs. Just consider an activity as anodyne as smoking. From the late 19th century right through to the mid 1980s, Western societies displayed an amazing tolerance for this vice. Indeed it often seemed impolite of self-righteous non-smokers to deny smokers an opportunity to indulge in their carcinogenic habit. Then as anti-smoking campaigns began to resonate with the wider public , more and more public spaces became smoke-free. While in the 1960s, when adult smoking rates peaked in Britain and elsewhere, the non-smoking minority had to endure great discomfort in many workplaces and on public transport, today smokers are treated as pariahs forced to bear bad weather outdoors and even forbidden from lighting up in parks or in the vicinity of public buildings such as schools and hospitals. As long we can openly debate the pros and cons of anti-smoking measures in the best interests of all members of society, I don't see a problem. The debate helps us resolve conflicts between collective responsibility and personal freedom, e.g. you may enjoy the freedom to smoke, but are you prepared to pay for your additional healthcare needs and afford others their freedom to breathe fresh air? The point is free speech inevitably includes the right to offend people who partake in practices you may not like. We couldn't ban smoking in 1960s because it would upset around two-thirds of adults. If I rant and rail against selfish motorists, many could take offence. In a perfect world we would all get plenty of exercise and travel by the most energy-efficient and environmentally means, but in practice people have to get to work on time, deliver goods and want to lead their lives to the full.

The true irony of the current situation is that social conservatives, often supportive of their country's armed forces, and leftwing antiwar activists, often dismissive of the plight of war veterans are both victims of political correctness. Some may lament that political correctness forces us overlook underlying biological differences between men and women, while others are more concerned with war propaganda. Life is certainly easier if you recycle the current orthodoxy that nation states are outmoded, Russia is a meddlesome bully, the European Union is a force for good and Muslims wish to live in peace and harmony with the Western LGBTQ+ community. But to believe the polar opposites of this *Guardian-esque *fairytale worldview would be equally misguided. In a complex and technologically interdependent world we have to find peaceful means to reconcile our differences. I'd rather do that through fierce and open debate with divergent sources of information than suppress intellectual freedom. If history is any guide, the alternative to free speech is not a utopia of perfectly synchronised like-minded progressives, but a complete breakdown in social trust leading inevitably to violence and more authoritarian means of people management.

Tags communism, corporatism, media, Power dynamics, war

Power Dynamics

Unmasking the True Enemies of the Liberal Enlightenment

Post author By neilg63
Post date 18th March 2018
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The liberal enlightenment rests on three core tenets:

Social cohesion enabling peaceful coexistence of all communities and relative equality of opportunity.
Participatory democracy to resolve common disputes that arise in any complex society reliant on advanced technology
Intellectual freedom to facilitate the free exchange of ideas letting ordinary people speak truth to power

I could also add a fine balance between personal freedom and collective responsibility. Indeed free speech itself needs legal protection to ensure rational debate and prevent a descent into authoritarianism. Just consider the recent debate at Kings College London between objectivist Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute and Youtube commentator Carl Benjamin, better known online as Sargon of Akkad. In a liberal democracy one may agree, disagree and even vehemently disagree with their expressed opinions. One may also discount their analysis as uninformed or even potentially dangerous, if we acted on their conclusions. That is the purpose of rational debate within a democratic system that respects the will of an informed and politically aware electorate. So a bunch of upper middle class students associated with Antifa (which in the UK is usually known as Hope not Hate or is that Hate not Hope?) decided not to engage in rational debate, but to disrupt the discussion and moronically chant empty anti-fascist slogans. The irony is that neither speaker advocated an extreme concentration power in the state, the curtailment of basic civil liberties or discrimination along ethnic or racial lines. However, even if they did, I'd rather defeat their ideas in a peaceful debate than censor their views altogether. Intellectual freedom does not include the right to silence others or to resort to insensitive and gratuitous insults.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/f5C1cPKmiPc

Banning Social Conservatives

This set the stage for two seemingly unrelated sets of events over the last week. First three social conservatives critical of Islam and uncontrolled mass migration were banned from entering the United Kingdom under schedule 7 of the 2000 Antiterrorism Act. The pretext is that their views may trigger acts of violence against Muslims, such as last year's Finsbury Mosque attack by a lone van driver with a history of drug addiction and mental illness. Canadian journalist Lauren Southern and American author Brittany Pettibone are best known as Youtube polemicists. Ms Pettibone's boyfriend, Martin Sellner, is a leading light in the Austrian Identitarian movement, which campaigns for the preservation of European culture. None have advocated violence or even the deportation of law-abiding immigrants in their own own countries. But whether one agrees with their views is neither here nor there, at stake is whether such views may be openly debated and, if not, which other political perspectives may soon be off-limits. They did not seek to settle in the UK, claim benefits, seek employment or break any normal laws, but their musings did fall foul of the Orwellian concept of hate speech. The London Metropolitan Police has helpfully clarified what this ill-defined offence means to them:

A hate crime is when someone commits a crime against you because of your disability, gender identity, race, sexual orientation, religion, or any other perceived difference. It doesn't always include physical violence. Someone using offensive language towards you or harassing you because of who you are, or who they think you are, is also a crime. The same goes for someone posting abusive or offensive messages about you online. If it happens to you, you might be tempted to shrug it off.

In other words, they punish perceived intention rather than actual acts. Thus my musings on the mental health agenda could be deemed hate crimes as may offend psychiatric patients. If we interpret the above definition literally, we cannot voice any opinions about the physical or intellectual capabilities of other human beings for fear of hurting someone's feelings. May I suggest that some people are morbidly obese in part because of lifestyle choices and not only because of genetic susceptibility. When will we start arresting people for claiming that obesity may be a preventable condition? Clearly rational debate is not possible if we resort to gratuitous offence, but there must be a platform for debates on all ideas, however absurd or hateful they may seem. If my neighbour were morbidly obese, I would avoid directly attributing to her any direct blame for her condition, whose causes might be a complex interplay between environmental stressors, social alienation, peer pressure and biology. However, it would be irrational not to objectively investigate the causes of a medical condition that not only shortens lifespans, but also limits personal independence.

Russophobia

Just as news broke about the full extent of the Telford grooming gang scandal and the way criminal investigations were hampered by political correctness and corruption, the BBC turned its attention to the poisoning of former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter, Yulia, with the notorious nerve agent, Novichok originally developed by the USSR in the 1970s. The government were quick to blame Vladimir Putin's Russian administration directly for this attack. Yes the same government that is happy not just to sell arms to the world's third or fourth largest military spender, Saudi Arabia, but also rolls out the red carpet to its leaders, is more concerned about alleged human rights abuses in Russia while clamping down on free speech in the UK. Saudi Arabia is currently engaged in a murderous bombing campaign in Northern Yemen and has facilitated the arming and funding of ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The Saudi regime is not just responsible for the poisoning a few rogue agents around the world, but has directly aided and abetted unspeakable crimes against humanity and funded virulent strands of Islamic fundamentalism. It truly defies belief that British Foreign Secretary should voice concerns about gay rights in Russia, where homosexuality is legal between consenting adults, while selling arms to a regime that jails people for engaging in homosexual acts.

What we may best call the globalist British mafia, deeply entrenched in the intelligence services, state media, the civil service and naturally in government, unleashed a propaganda offensive, effectively accusing anyone who disputed their version of events of, wait for it, conspiracy theorism. If Sergei Skripal posed such a danger to Vladimir Putin, why would they wait until just before the Russian presidential elections and World Cup to score a massive own goal ? Why would they use a nerve agent like Novichok clearly associated with the former USSR that can kill indiscriminately. Why could they not resort to more conventional means such as setting a honey trap for their former spy and getting his mistress to poison his food? If Putin is in any way responsible for this dastardly act, we can only conclude that he may not be so cunning after all. Besides in the era of instant online communication, Russia can much more effectively extend its influence via Russia Today than by crude attempts to kill long-forgotten exiled traitors. Why would they carry out an act that would empower the UK and other Western governments to censor the Russian antidote to BBC and CNN disinformation? We might entertain the possibility that rogue elements within the Russian state or mercenaries acting on behalf of Russian oligarchs with a grudge against Putin carried out the attack, but it occurred just ten miles from UK's premier chemical weapons research facility in Porton Down. The mainstream media has stressed how the Novichok nerve agent could only have come from Russia, but fail to mention that one of the leading Soviet-era chemical weapons factories was in Uzbekistan, to which US and UK military personnel have gained access since the breakup of the USSR.

There are many good reasons to question the judgment of Jeremy Corbyn, but as leader of the opposition he was almost alone in expressing doubts about the UK establishment's drive to blame the Russia state, in order to impose tougher sanctions and deploy limited military resources to combat a perceived threat from a vast and sparsely populated landmass with extensive natural resources and little motivation to invade the British Isles. Mr Corbyn didn't even challenge the official narrative, he just asked for conclusive proof before we risk escalating hostilities with Russia and potentially triggering World War Three. Naturally most MPs recycled mainstream Western propaganda about the Syrian civil war levelling the blame at Assad and Putin, rather than at the head chopping militias who the US, UK and Saudi Arabia armed and funded. Not surprisingly the most vehement warmongering came from the usual suspects. Most notably, the author of the infamous 2003 Iraq Dossier, Alastair Campbell, used his column of the New European to advocate an alliance with the rest of the EU against Russia. Interestingly the New European, distributed free in some areas, appeals mainly to the kind of left-leaning young adults who protested againt Alastair Campbell's wars in early 2000s.

Connecting the Dots

How can we connect student campaigns against free speech, silencing Zionist advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, the banning of vocal social conservatives deemed far right from the UK and now the silencing or vilification of anyone who doubts the official narrative about the Salisbury nerve agent incident? It's obvious they are all attacks on intellectual freedom.

How can the UK state fail to protect vulnerable adolescent girls (some as young as 11) from culturally divergent grooming gangs, allow continued unbalanced migration, arm and fund Islamic fundamentalist militias in the Middle East and with a straight face claim it wishes to defend British citizens ? True patriots do not uncritically support their ruling elites, we stand up for the best interests of our families, neighbours, communities and wider society. If our ruling elites consistently pursue policies that threaten the freedom, safety, and security of our communities, we must stand up to tyranny.

Once again, we see an odd alliance of allegedly rightwing social conservatives and avowedly leftwing veteran antiwar campaigners question the official narrative on unfolding events. We need not read the Guardian to learn that the use of nerve agents is a barbaric contravention of human rights or that internecine conflict in Syria is an unspeakable human tragedy. But we must judge news outlets by their recent track record on apportioning blame for these events on the official enemies of our ruling cabal. If we analyse BBC coverage of events in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and most recently Syria through a critical lens, we discover numerous claims made over the years which turned out to be either grotesque exaggerations (e.g. allegations that Serb Security Forces were responsible for the death of 100,000 Kosovar Albanians in 1999) to outright lies and staged events such as the notorious 2013 documentary Saving Syria's Children.

I believe the real Jeremy Corbyn is a latter-day idealist, whose passionate defence of radical democratic socialism ironically serves the interests of dark actors with close ties to the world's leading banking cartels and corporations. These power-hungry elites are quite happy for naive students to silence perceived enemies of social justice, for governments to pursue foreign policies that endanger their own people and to oversee unprecedented rates of destabilising demographic and cultural change and for international bodies to introduce Chinese-style media censorship to combat the spectre of unofficial fake news.

We live in dangerous times. Sooner or later as centre of political power continues to move away from North America and Western Europe to East Asia allied with resource-rich Russia, the BBC's disinformation will become public knowledge and its reputation will lie in tatters. The decline of Britain as world power began long before it joined the EU, but with a buffoonish Foreign Secretary and a mumbling Prime Minister, the UK has become a laughing stock. Sadly given events elsewhere in Europe, it is not alone.

Tags anarchy, capitalism, communism, corporatism, crimes, media, Power dynamics, sustainability

All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Why does the Regressive Left worship the NHS?

Post author By neilg63
Post date 30th December 2017
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Or rather why do metropolitan elites not trust the Working Classes?

Before you doubt my sanity, let me clarify a couple of buzzwords in the title. By regressive left I mean a widespread political current that positions itself on the progressive left, but always sides, when push comes to shove, with remote institutions who want to control rather than empower ordinary people. If progress means redressing the balance of power from elites to humble commoners, we should call many policies favoured by today's trendy left regressive as they undo much of the real emancipatory progress we have made since we cast aside the tyranny of our feudal overlords and the slave labour masters of early capitalism.

The second misconception is that anyone who questions the sanctity of the UK's National Health Service must be motivated by the vilest hatred towards the sick and disabled. Most of us aspire to good health and greater personal independence, which usually entails ideally being able-bodied. Medical advances have in many ways worked wonders enabling more otherwise incapacitated people to survive than ever before. Moreover, assistive technology can overcome the limitations of many physical and sensory disabilities, which most of us would agree is a good thing. I wouldn't wish paraplegia on anyone, but I welcome the availability of electric wheelchairs, adapted cars, hoists and robots to help the victims of spinal injuries lead more independent lives. However, the real debate is not whether we need health services, but how do we best provide healthcare to let more people lead meaningful lives? In other words, should our healthcare system empower us to lead the lives we want or should it empower professional elites to control our lives for the greater good?

I recently sprained my ankle on black ice, struggled to stand up afterwards and needed help to travel home. As the pain did not subside and my ankle swelled, my wife took me to the local A&E for an X-Ray. Predictably I was asked about all the medical conditions I may have, what medication I was on, whether I smoked, how much exercise I got, whether I had had a flu jab or suffered from any mental health issues. Ever since a misdiagnosis for a neurological condition 15 years ago, I've been a low-maintenance NHS patient. I hardly ever use the service unless I really need to. Admittedly the NHS did help me following two road accidents as a child, but back in the 1970s total healthcare spending amounted to just 4% of GDP. It now stands at 8% and rising without taking into account the country's huge social welfare budget and the growing private healthcare sector.

Like it or not, lifestyle changes and better medical technology have transformed the healthcare sector as we live longer and are more likely to be diagnosed with lifelong conditions requiring some form of treatment. Being on life support is a mixed blessing. You may enjoy more fruitful years of your life, but at the expense of less personal independence. If you're a subsistence farmer eking out a frugal living on a remote farmstead, you can maintain a high degree of personal independence as long as you are able-bodied. Sooner or later we all die, but the experiences we cherish most are our personal achievements in building a livelihood for ourselves and our loved ones. If other organisations assume these roles, then these feats are no longer personal achievements, but merely rewards for our participation in wider society.

I'd like to think that control over your body is one of the most fundamental human rights, but apparently not if you subscribe to the concept of socialised medicine in which healthcare professionals implement solutions that minimise the incidence of disease and problematic medical conditions in the general population. A classic example of this mentality is fluoridation of the water supply. Small doses of fluoride can help combat tooth decay when applied topically in the form of toothpaste. I won't debate whether alternatives are more effective or how we managed before the advent of toothpaste. Nonetheless, many people are lazy and do not brush their teeth as regularly and effectively as they should. In the 1940s some social planners heeded advice from phosphate industry lobbyists to add fluoride to the municipal water supply. Many surveys published since have shown marginal decreases in the incidence of caries in working class children, the category most at risk. However, dental health has improved in leaps and bounds almost everywhere over the last 50 years, mainly due to better personal hygiene and a growing obsession of perfectly aligned white teeth, in regions that have never introduced fluoridation, which is most of continental Europe. Indeed many independent biochemists have argued that risks of foetal brain damage and dental fluorosis caused by a fluoride overdose outweigh the marginal benefits of reducing tooth decay in vulnerable individuals who eat lots of sweets and fail to clean their teeth often enough. While public policy wonks may debate its effectiveness, fluoridation transfers responsibility away from families and individuals to remote organisations. Support for such policies always comes from elitist think tanks, and seldom comes from grassroots movements. People like to have emergency health services available locally in case of unexpected injuries or illnesses, hence widespread public opposition to the closure of smaller local hospitals, but almost total indifference to the provision of flu jabs. Sure nobody likes to get the flu, but many of us remain unconvinced of the efficacy of a vaccine against a common family of viruses that keep mutating. As it happens, many of us have friends and family who have succumbed to flu despite agreeing to their annual injections. Alas we often have little choice than to go along with professional medical advice. Vaccines against common diseases are now practically mandatory for school children, teachers and care workers due to the concept of herd immunity. It doesn't matter what you think as a mere layperson about the effectiveness of medication, only what health professionals advise you to do.

The relative pros and cons of vaccination and fluoridation may be the least of our worries. Moves are underway to merge healthcare, social care and psychological monitoring, also known as mental healthcare. Inevitably over time combined social, physical and mental healthcare will amalgamate with education and policing too. Currently politicians from all parties here fall over each other to support the equality of mental and physical health. Sadly few have seen where this is leading us as we begin to equate unwelcome feelings, awkward personalities and politically incorrect beliefs with real illnesses and injuries that have verifiable physiological causes. If I disagree with the orthodox view on climate change (and by the way I don't), I'm not diseased. I may be wrong, but that's my right. Likewise if I'm generally a bit grumpy and too argumentative for the likes of some colleagues and family members, that's my business. As a rule if you want to keep your friends, it's not good to be grumpy all the time, but we would not be human without feelings and a strong sense of self. If I visit my GP with a sprained ankle, I don't expect him or her to evaluate my state of mind, enquire about my erotic preferences or try to have me assessed for a flurry of unrelated medical issues such as diabetes or prostate cancer. We may call this modern approach mission creep or disease-mongering.

Most practical people accept the need for public services in any complex society reliant on infrastructure like roads, railways, clean water supply, electric power and telecommunications. I know some libertarian anarchists imagine all services could eventually be privatised or run by small cooperatives, but let's be honest human nature would soon lead to some very exploitative practices as some entrepreneurs try to outsmart the masses and create new oligopolies. The point is do these public services serve us or do we serve them ?

One of the main dilemmas of modern medicine is the sensitive topic of personal responsibility. If I choose to engage in dangerous sports such as free climbing, off-piste skiing or motocross, should I expect my socialised health service to foot the bill in the event of an accident? Likewise if I prefer not to wear a seatbelt or crash helmet, should I expect other taxpayers to subsidise the additional costs of post-trauma care if I suffer severe brain damage that these safety devices may have prevented? Today in most Western countries one has little choice but to comply with strict regulations on these matters. So what happens if I choose to eat lots of junk food and partake in regular in binge drinking sessions, both perfectly legal activities in Western Europe? Should my indulgences be taxed to subsidise my statistically greater chance of succumbing to a broad gamut of diseases and, come to think of it, mental illnesses?

We really have to ask how a small subset of the population can cost the NHS a disproportionate amount of resources due to illnesses related to lifestyle choices. Yet now social justice activists play politics with good science by downplaying the importance of personal agency and social values while emphasising inherited behavioural traits or neurological diversity. Thus a dysfunctional behaviour like gambling addiction may be viewed as a neurological defect rather than a problem either with somebody's lack of wisdom or with the cultural pressures that may have led to such ill-judgment.

Solidarity requires trust and mutual respect, which in turn rely on strong cultural compatibility. We can either win the trust and respect of our neighbours through our own good conduct or we can rely on external agencies to engineer solidarity through education, awareness raising, social monitoring and law enforcement. By medicalising a condition that we would have until recently considered just part of someone's personality, the authorities can expand the range of people who require some form of treatment and thus depend on their guardianship. The system, for want of a better word, treats us increasingly like children incapable of making rational choices without some official advice. It wants us not just to seek their guidance, but to be fully integrated into an invasive human inspection network. The more often we require some form of interaction with social and medical services, the more they can monitor every aspect of our private lives and delve into our innermost thoughts. Just imagine visiting your GP for a regular checkup, only to be asked not just about your sexuality, but your state of mind via a series of questions that tap into your attitudes about key cultural and philosophical issues. What if your GP is required to ascertain not just if you're gay or straight, but if you have opinions that some may consider homophobic or Islamophic? I doubt medical professionals would ask such questions directly, but these subjects may crop up in a discussion about your mental health e.g. Suppose a patient reported feeling depressed because she's the only non-Muslim person left in her street since her old neighbours moved away. Should her GP note her patient's cultural alienation as a contributing factor to her depressed state of mind or should she consider her patient's perceived xenophobia as a medical condition in and of itself? With the rapid proliferation of recognised personality disorders, it is easy to see how concerns about someone's mental health can blur into an intrusive investigation of their philosophical outlook on life in a drive to mould people's behavioural patterns for the greater good of wider society. But who gets to decide what is good for society or not? Inevitably this task will fall to a bureaucratic elite of social planners and their army of enforcers in the guise of health visitors, primary school teachers, special needs assistants and social workers.

Hierarchical Collectivism vs Widespread Empowerment

The anti-plutocratic left, with which I still identify, has long had two main currents that aim:

to engineer a collectivist social conscience via an enlightened vanguard or
to empower millions of ordinary workers to lead more fulfilling lives with greater personal independence.

Most ordinary people focused on their immediate circumstances and the wellbeing of their family and friends favour the latter approach. Campaigns for better pay and working conditions appeal to millions of common folk. In a battle between greedy bosses and poorly paid shop floor workers, the empowerment left sides with the wage-earners rather the parasitical managerial classes. That's broadly why left-leaning parties like Labour in Britain still attract more support from the notional proletarian demographic. Despite all its betrayals, many of us just can't bring ourselves to vote tactically for the Tories and hesitate before placing our cross next to demonised parties associated with the nationalist right.

In most of Europe and North America the working classes have long given up on ideological socialism as a route to self-empowerment. Meanwhile, the vanguard left have co-opted other victim groups to further their cause and have counter-intuitively forged new alliances with the emerging technocratic elite, who no longer need a large skilled working class.

The ongoing cybernetic revolution with the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and versatile robotics will soon dispense with rank and file workers and thereby consign the labour movement to the dustbin of history. What matters is not so much the percentage of people who are in some way employed, but the proportion of mission-critical workers whose expertise cannot be easily replaced. The latter number has declined significantly. If project managers, recruiters, marketing executives, health and safety inspectors, social media supervisors and psychiatric nurses all go on strike, the system will not grind to a halt overnight, just its smooth operation will not be monitored as meticulously. Rest assured that many aspects of these jobs will eventually be computerised too.

Elite Projects

Working class idealists of yore dreamed of a bottom-up revolution in which the workers would overthrow their bosses. By contrast today's social justice activists infiltrate NGOs, public sector organisations and increasingly big business itself to campaign for greater social regulation and surveillance. The healthcare sector is at the very epicentre of the new social-corporate complex that is gradually emerging from closer integration of tech giants, leading retailers, public services, charities and government. Facebook, Twitter and Google are deeply integrated not only with Amazon, but increasingly with supermarket chains like Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury's, your local hospital and myriad third sector organisations involved in various aspects of our lives. It's hard to tell where one ends and another begins.

Most policies that media pundits like to call progressive on topics as diverse as immigration to transgender rights and mental healthcare, tend to appeal much more to professional elites than to ordinary people on the ground, unless they can be persuaded that they belong to a favoured victim group. Back in the day leftwing activists would stand up for factory workers, miners and lorry drivers because they were exploited by their greedy bosses. These days upper middle class leftists champion the disabled, mentally ill, single parents, LGBTQ+ community and, of course, new itinerant communities defined by their ethno-religious affiliation as potential beneficiaries of what we can only logically call corporate welfare and potential clients of the mushrooming social surveillance sector.

Who Funds the Welfare Panacea ?

Over the last two decades Western European healthcare policies have ironically taken their lead from North America with a growing emphasis on the proactive diagnosis of medical conditions and precautionary mass medication, despite mean life expectancy being higher in most of the Western European than in the US. Healthcare spending per capita is significantly higher in the US with often exorbitant medical insurance bills. However, this lavishness has led to greater innovation and a much higher propensity to treat a wider range of medical conditions, bodily imperfections and psychological challenges. Traditionally Britain's NHS had a reputation for frugal cost-effectiveness and was, until recently, much less inclined to treat ailments that did not significantly impair someone's livelihood, such as cosmetic surgery to treat depression resulting from a poor body image. As a result the health spending gap between the world's top economies has closed.

The biomedical lobby has appealed both to growing public demand and to the instincts of politicians keen to improve healthcare to persuade either government or insurers to fund a massive expansion of their industry. This is not necessarily bad news as advances in medical technology have undoubtedly saved the lives of millions who until recently would have suffered early deaths. However, it has also greatly increased the number of people who depend on regular medical treatment, turned many into hypochondriacs and medicalised emotional unease. In his 2010 book Anatomy of Epidemic Robert Whitaker chronicled the proliferation of psychiatric diagnoses in the United States , which has now spread to Europe. Prescription rates for depression, social anxiety and psychosis are also soaring in the UK, as highlighted only yesterday in the left's bête noire, the Daily Mail. This predictably led twitter activists and virtue-signalling bloggers to condemn the popular newspaper for sensationalism and hatred against millions of ordinary people on such medication. Only a decade ago, most criticism of pharmaceutical lobbies would have come from the left. Alas drugs play a major role not only in mental health treatment, but in promoting alternative sexual lifestyles and gender expressions. The biomedical lobby is totally on board with the new fad for transgenderism, yet another excuse for medical intervention on spurious neurological grounds. Yet few ask just how are we going to fund this huge expansion in the age of smart automation and a growing wealth gap? In the end big business will foot the bill as practically the only generators of real wealth, but only by turning patients into loyal customers and experimental products.

The elitist left plan to secure their key role in the new social management sector by actively championing any causes or cultural trends that boost the number of people who need some form of monitoring. This is not social progress as I imagined it as a young socialist over 30 years ago. Social justice warriors, as many critics call this new breed of arrogant bandwagon jumpers, do not want to overthrow the establishment, they want to cheerlead the new technocratic establishment's attempts to reimagine humanity.

Tags All in the mind, communism, corporatism, Power dynamics

Computing Power Dynamics

Is Capitalism Morphing Into Communism?

Post author By neilg63
Post date 26th November 2017
No Comments on Is Capitalism Morphing Into Communism?

Under communism you buy everything from a single state outlet, whereas under fully mature capitalism you buy everything from Amazon. Karl Sharro

I once dreamed of a socialist utopia devoid of hate, fear, anxiety, poverty and interpersonal rivalry with common ownership of the means of production. This fantasy comes in two main flavours, idealistic anarcho-communism based on small cooperatives with no central states or organised means of coercion in a tangled maze of hippie communes converging miraculously on a carefree lifestyle of fluid relationships. The other kind of socialism assumes a strong state responsible for regulating every aspect of our communal lives and overseeing our private behaviour, lest we act in an unduly selfish or hateful manner. While anarcho-communism takes a fundamentally Rousseauian view of human nature, assuming that without the oversight of higher authorities, we will revert to our natural state of peace-loving and inherently altruistic creatures, state socialism relies on a complex web of organisations to enforce social conformity and solidarity. Marx foresaw that a workers' state would gradually transform human nature over several generations until the institutions of surveillance and coercion could eventually disappear.

It is easy to dismiss the great socialist experiments of the 20th century in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, North Korea and Cuba either as deformed workers' states or state-capitalist. The latest catastrophe is Venezuela that failed to diversify its economy to free itself from the grip of multinationals. These regimes relied on technology developed in advanced capitalist economies and could not deliver their people with the kind of living standards millions of ordinary working class people enjoyed in Western Europe and North America, because state coercion and engineered solidarity failed to motivate creativity and innovation. However, now capitalism is failing too. It cannot survive without subsidised mass consumerism and debt-driven economic growth. Until recently advanced mixed economies relied on the salaries of skilled workers to keep the consumer economy afloat. Now most manufacturing jobs have been either outsourced to low wage regions and/or undergone substantial automation, workers can only aspire to service sector careers that either require a high level of analytical intelligence or exceptional people skills. As the artificial intelligence and robotics revolution progresses, businesses will need to hire fewer and fewer ordinary people with mediocre skillsets. Today large corporations need consumers more than workers. As AI and robots displace monotonous manual and clerical jobs, big business will rely on governments to subsidise their customers. Arguably this has been going on for years in the UK. Most jobs are now involved in people management, social surveillance, retail, entertainment, education, infrastructure inspection or banking.

If big business needed creative, resourceful and independent-minded workers, you can bet they would lobby government to improve academic standards in schools and invest billions in STEM. Alas big business only needs the best and brightest. They may complain that they can't hire enough seasoned programmers or bioscientists and have to import specialists from abroad, but they know only a small minority of graduates have a high enough IQ to be worthwhile employing and rewarding with handsome salaries. Many have criticised modern schooling for focussing too much on socialisation and attitudes than on the practical skills young adults might need in the workplace. Customer relations has suddenly become more important than fixing someone's car or washing machine. While a good mechanic may lose business by insulting his customers, an incompetent mechanic may be blessed with a wonderful sense of humour, but cannot compensate for shoddy workmanship through soft skills, at least not for long. If smart robots supplant human beings in practical jobs like mechanics, plumbers, drivers, bricklayers and farm labourers, people within the median IQ range can only aspire to tasks that require a degree of human authenticity, mainly in the persuasion and care sectors. Persuasion encompasses a very wide range of modern professions, anything from marketing to social work, teaching and charities. I've long argued that schools should refocus on practical skills, but I've not been a lone voice. Every consultation about secondary education in the UK yields similar results. Small businesses and parents alike want smaller class sizes and greater emphasis on vocational skills. There is virtually no grassroots movement calling for more lessons on gender theory or more mental health screening. Such calls inevitably come from well-funded lobbies and spurious charities that pop up from nowhere and suddenly have articulate spokespersons on TV shouting down traditional naysayers.

The left has correctly in my view accused both New Labour from 1997 to 2010 and then three Tory-led governments ever since of colluding with big business. Yet if big business is in the driving seat, why would they support an education system that has clearly failed to train a new generation of conscientious workers able to accomplish all the practical jobs we have traditionally needed? Is it because the government is totally incompetent or driven by ideological concerns at odds with the needs of big business? I'm sorry to admit, but we really have to consider another more disturbing explanation: Large corporations do not need workers. They need consumers.

Outsourcing and smart automation have boosted productivity to such an extent that a few hundred highly skilled technicians can manage a manufacturing facility capable of supplying sophisticated products to tens of millions of consumers. Most of the auxiliary jobs around manufacturing such as shipping, quality assurance and accounting can also be automated too. Much of the marketing and sales operation has already moved online, requiring human input only for client-facing roles, but if you've interacted with automated help lines or online sales chat bots, you can see how artificial intelligence is set to transform our lives. Not only do we now have more car sales representatives than automotive production line operatives, we probably have more high street charity awareness raisers than solar panel and wind turbine technicians. More people are employed to persuade others to adapt their lifestyles and embrace new ways in our dynamic interdependent society than to provide the goods and services we really need.

Whether your electricity supply works or you can afford transportation to your places of work, study or socialisation are no longer viewed as mainly technical challenges, but have become human rights issues. However, capitalism can no longer guarantee the minimum living standard to which we have become accustomed without significant state intervention. The political debate has moved on from how to generate wealth to how to persuade big business to share more of its wealth with the advanced welfare states of affluent countries. However, the state will only subsidise your lifestyle if you play by its rules and big business will only be prepared to bankroll the public sector if it grants them special privileges. Let us just consider your typical provincial town in early 21st century UK. The biggest employers are the local council, the National Health Service , the large supermarket chains and increasingly the distribution warehouses of major online retailers, which in practice means mainly Amazon. Other big employers include charities, banks and insurance brokers, whose role is either to manage your indebtedness or raise awareness for various social transformation initiatives. Hard work, as we traditionally understood the concept, seldom reaps substantial rewards. Instead we rely more and more on social networking and delegation of responsibilities to other human or technical resources.

This is perhaps the biggest paradox of the early 21st century. Just as capitalism seems invincible, its most powerful exponents seek to phase it out and replace it with a command economy, managed by global corporations with the illusion of brand choice for the masses and healthy competition only for the professional elites. The ensuing socio-economic model may resemble an amalgamation of Swedish welfarism and Chinese authoritarianism much more than late 20th century North America. The captains of high tech industry have finally realised they do not need many workers, only compliant consumers.

Tags capitalism, communism, Computing, corporatism, hegemony, history, Power dynamics, sustainability

Power Dynamics

Destabilising Europe

What's going on in Catalonia?

I seldom comment on unfolding events before I can establish some basic facts and investigate all the forces at play. I woke up this morning to a twitter stream showing violent clashes between the Spanish Guardia Civil and unarmed Catalan citizens attempting to vote in the region's independence referendum. I think Mariano Rajoy's central government have not only seriously misjudged the public mood in Catalonia, but their heavy-handed and morally indefensible actions will backfire massively. Recent polls suggested only 40% supported full independence, but now that percentage must be much higher. Despite a recent influx of newcomers from the Middle East and North Africa, Spaniards from other regions form by far the largest minority and many Catalans are descendants of earlier waves of migration from Spain's poorer regions. While the Catalan language was suppressed under Franco, since the late 1980s it's been the main language of instruction in state schools. Indeed parents have to explicitly request Castillian Spanish medium instruction. Yet Spanish is still the most widely spoken home language (According to Wikipedia 47.5% speak Spanish as their main tongue versus 44.3% for Catalan). Catalonia is undoubtedly Spain's richest region with its highest per capita income. As a result it subsidises poorer regions such as Andalucia and Extremadura and some estimate to the tune of â‚¬16 billion a year.

Back in the mid 1990s I witnessed the rise of the Northern League (Lega Nord) in Italy. Their leader, Umberto Bossi, ranted and railed against Southern Italians. For a few years it seemed the North, known as Padania, may very well have severed ties with Italy's boot. I lived in provincial Veneto where most residents still spoke the local dialect, Veneto, which many considered a language in its own right. Veneto has as much claim to independence from Italy as Catalonia does from Spain. The Venetian Republic lasted until 1796 before being split into two regions under Austrian rule. Italy did not unite until 1871. By contrast Catalonia has been in a union with Castille since Ferdinand II of Aragon married Queen Isabella I of Castile in 1469. However, the governments and legal system did not merge until the aftermath of the War of Succession in 1714, just 7 years after Scotland joined the United Kingdom. The Kingdom of Aragon covered a much larger territory comprising modern communities of Valencia, Aragon and the Balearic Islands as well as Sardinia, Sicily, Naples and briefly Athens. All fascinating stuff, but why would the Catalans want to secede from Spain now if most real economic power lies with multinationals and the EU?

Some may prefer to jump on bandwagons and support the side that appears to have popular momentum behind it. If you supported the rebels in Kosovo, Libya or Syria, you may be surprised to learn US and UK agencies and proxies armed and funded them all. Our media told us pretty much who the good and bad guys were. The problem here is that no country, region or ethnic group today lives in a bubble, except for a few isolated tribes. Self-determination may be a fine ideal in theory, but in practice smaller countries without substantial natural resources have to bow to the diktat of large corporations and superstates. The only apparent exceptions are city states with highly educated citizens like Singapore that serve as financial hubs.

In 2014 I had mixed feelings towards Scottish Independence. In an ideal world I'd have a loose federation of countries and regions within the British Isles. The UK has three main downsides. Most of its population lives in England, its economic activity is concentrated in the South East and it has a thorny imperial legacy. To me Scottish independence would have made sense in the 1970s if the country could have invested its oil wealth in a new high tech economy, while supporting its traditional farming and fishing communities. Alas today's SNP proposes independence within the EU, which essentially means transferring decision-making powers from London to Brussels. Worse still, Scotland exports more than 4 times more to the rest of the UK than it does to the EU27 (the EU post-Brexit). For me the strongest argument in favour of Scottish Independence was the SNP's opposition to Trident nuclear missiles and some aspects of US-led military adventurism. Honestly, with falling proceeds from North Oil the Scottish economy is a basket case, heavily reliant on subsidies from central government and on trade with England.

Catalonia, by contrast, can just as easily trade with France and other European countries as it can with the rest of Iberia. A rump Spain would lose more than a separate Catalonia. However, there's more to life than short-term economic expediency and other problems are looming on the horizon for Catalans. In a world of independent nation states, it would be fairly easy solve the Catalan question. Catalonia could become an independent country for most matters just like Portugal, but join an Iberian Federation to cooperate on strategic infrastructure, environemntal and security issues. Sadly we live in an asymetric world dominated by supranational entities. Only 6 weeks ago, Islamic terrorists killed 13 civilians and injured 130 in Barcelona's renowned La Rambla district. Catalonia has the third highest concentration of Muslims in Western Europe, an estimated 6% of the population and growing through immigration and higher fertility rate. The vast majority are first or second generation immigrants. Paradoxically Catalonia was only briefly part of al-Andalus, the Arabic name given to Iberia under Muslim rule.

While many Catalans are not happy about subsidising their brothers and sisters in Southern Spain, their politicians are fully signed up to the EU project and favour large-scale migration from North Africa and elsewhere. The current President of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, heads the Catalan European Democratic Party, which belongs to the same ultra-federalist ALDE group as EU evangelist Guy Verhofstadt. The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe group wants to see a pan-European army, a unified fiscal regime and continent-wide harmonisation of most other domains of governance such as welfare, healthcare and even education. In an era of open borders, Catalan independence would be a pyrrhic victory. No sooner would they gain greater fiscal autonomy from the rest of Iberia, than they would end up subsidising the rest of Europe while accommodating larger transient communities of North Africans and Middle Easterners. They may well have to speak less Spanish, but more Arabic and Pidgin English. An independent Catalonia within a volatile European Union would not be more Catalan, only less Spanish.

However, the attitude of other European leaders may seem rather puzzling. Yesterday, Emanuel Macron urged Catalonians to support Spanish Unity, a rather odd position for a Frenchman committed to a federal Europe and mass migration. The BBC initiallly presented both sides of the debate. This rather reminds me of the beginning of the Yugoslav civil wars in the early 1990s when the BBC World Service would air many voices in favour of Yugoslav unity. Let's not forget in both world wars, many Slovenians, Croats, Bosnians and Kosovars had sided with the occupying Axis powers against the Allies. Yet by the mid 1990s the main US, UK and other Western European media outlets had overwhelming anti-Serb bias. Today, the Spanish government is portrayed as neo-Fancoist and certainly the antics of its Guardia Civil have done little to dispel that reputation. The real question has to be why the Spanish government thinks it can get away with such violent intimidation in an era of live video streaming ? They have either mishandled the situation in acts of extreme incompetence or they have been led to believe they have the full weight of the international community behind them as remarks from the UK's Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, might suggest.

Technically the Catalan referendum contravenes the 1978 Spanish constitution that does not allow any region to secede without the explcit consent of all Spaniards. It would be like having a UK-wide referendum on Scottish independence. More intriguingly, recent opinion polls have shown support for Catalan independence is only around 40%. If Spain had simply allowed a Catalonia-only independence referendum, with a free and fair debate on both sides, it could well have won as so many Catalonians have relatives in other parts of Iberia. As it is their actions may yield the very outcome that will damage ordinary Spaniards most, separation, the empowerment of the EU and demise of viable nation states.

Tags anarchy, corporatism, hegemony, history, Power dynamics, war

All in the Mind Computing Power Dynamics

The Emerging Age of Absolutisms

Post author By neilg63
Post date 26th August 2017
No Comments on The Emerging Age of Absolutisms

What do corporate globalism, Islamic fundamentalism, communist idealism and neo-fascist romanticism all have in common besides being abstract isms? If you look at their attitudes to the key ethical questions of our age, their notional position on the left-right spectrum or their virtuosity in the public mind, they may appear at variance or even diametric opposites. Communists may wish to abolish private property, while neoliberal corporates may want to stick a price tag on everything from childcare, healthcare, hygiene, clean water to fresh air and open spaces. Communists and neoliberals may welcome gay rights and non-traditional families, while fascists and Islamists may enforce heteronormativity by severely punishing digression from an official view of sexual morality. What unites these ideologies is not their exact interpretation of human morality, justice and freedom, but their advocacy of a universal belief system, the notion that we are collectively progressing on a way road to a better tomorrow. They represent variants of collectivism, defined as allegiance to large companies (corporatism), to a monotheistic religious cult (Islamism), to an egalitarian ideal that does away with private property and competition (communism), or to the resurrection of a historically successful civilisation associated with a specific national community (fascist romanticism). Each of these absolutisms expects its denizens to adapt their behaviour to the needs of economic growth or social development, rather than to serve the best interests of their family or close-knit ethnic community, which have historically been our primary motivators. Put another way, these belief systems beseech us to worship different gods, be it big business, Allah, the vanguard party or one's mighty fatherland.

Blasts from the Past

Some academics have predicted that given current demographic and cultural trends within the Muslim diaspora, much of Western Europe and parts of North America may become part of a global Caliphate. Like communism and neoliberalism, Islam has universal ambitions. However, it relies on technology developed mainly in the non-Muslim world to feed, clothe and accessorise its growing army of followers. Should our current society collapse due to cultural decadence and a growing concentration of power in a technocratic elite, Islam may be poised to fill the void, but I doubt our current ruling classes would be very happy about handing over power to a technically illiterate theocracy. whose inability to deliver the goods, i.e. manage an economy that can satisfy their people's needs and desires, would lead to a never-ending cycle of civil wars just as we see in much of the Islamic world today. However, the spectre of Islam may serve other purpuses that suit the interests of our leading multinationals, who now need compliant consumers and malleable participants in social engineering experiment more than dependable workers. The growth of culturally incompatible parallel communities empowers the state to monitor every aspect of our lives lest we transgress.

The demographic transition of the West from mainly white European Christian countries to multiethnic, multiracial and multifaith societies has already begun to trigger a backlash from nostalgic nationalist or conservative opposition groups, aiming at least to slow the rate of cultural change. This can lead to strange alliances between those more concerned about the decline of family values among the native populace, mainly Christians, and those who fear the influx of migrants with divergent cultural backgrounds may reverse the liberal gains of recent decades on women's and gay rights. To explain the cognitive dissonance of the progressive alliance that embraces both Muslim immigration and trangenderism, critically thinking conservatives have coined the term regressive left, i.e. wishful thinkers who turn a blind eye to widespread sexual abuse within the growing Muslim communities while dismissing working class natives as low-information voters at best and knuckle-dragging racists at worst. Unlike Europe, the USA has maintained two important intellectual traditions, the libertarian right and small-government conservatism. Both groups are often critical of US foreign policy and crony capitalism. Libertarians may oppose welfarism, but support individual liberty and alternative lifestyles, e.g. favouring the legalisation of narcotics. Their attitude may overlap with some conceptions of anarchism. American Conservatives want to redress the balance of power away from central governments and large corporations to families, community organisations such as churches and small businesses. While conservatives support their country's right to self-defence as good patriots, they oppose military adventurism abroad unless they can be persuaded a foreign country poses an immediate threat to national security. However, both of these groups are now often labelled as alt-right or even far right for their politically incorrect views on welfare, immigration or sexuality. Growing sections of American working class now identify more with conservatives than with cosmopolitan liberals. We see a similar pattern across Europe too. The real divide is no longer left vs right, but conservatism vs radicalism. The multifarious strands of the traditionalist opposition disagree about which aspects of our cultural heritage we should conserve. A tiny minority of Americans and Europeans sympathise not with inclusive and philanthropic liberal traditions, but with negative nationalism and/or white supremacy, i.e. the notion that some ethnic or racial identities are not only superior to others, but have a right to subjugate and suppress other ethnic or racial groups they consider inferior. Some may sympathise with defunct dictatorships, downplay or deny their crimes or wish to resurrect racial segregation, all requiring state intervention and restrictions on individual liberty at odds with either social conservatism or libertarian capitalism, which have many African Americans such as Thomas Sowell or Ben Carson in their ranks. However, today's power brokers have long abandoned European ethnocentrism or Anglo-Saxon cultural hegemony in favour of a multicoloured universalism.

I suspect our social planners and business leaders view anachronistic white nationalists in the same way as they view regressive Islamists, i.e. a bunch of useful idiots whose feelings can be easily manipulated and whose spectre serves to justify more censorship, surveillance and social conditioning. The Trump phenomenon pandered to a mix of social conservatism and American exceptionalism. The perceived threat of gun-toting hillibies and latter-day apartheid supporters serves to justify more surveillance and counterbalance the threat of radical Islam. I can't help but notice how YouTube now interjects short videos against both Islamic extremism and Far-right extremism before videos critical of globalisation and/or Islam. Are the authorities worried I may join ISIS or a tiny Neo-Nazi sect of Hitler admirers or do they want to suggest that any alternatives to their narrative means siding with unpalatable genocidal extremists?

Capitalism morphing into Corporate Communism

For many decades we've largely bought the myth that the system we have is a mix of liberal democracy and free market capitalism because whatever its flaws it has afforded us not only the fastest rate of technological innovation ever experienced, but the illusion of greater personal freedom, which is something we all yearn for alongside good health, security and social bonding. Today freedom is often mistaken for indulgence in commercialised activities, but such synthetic escapism is only made possible by technology we cannot fully control. A long-haul air passenger is at the mercy of sophisticated jet propulsion engines and aircraft guidance systems. A motorist relies not only advanced automotive technology, but on an extensive road and fuel delivery network as well as on coordinated traffic management. You may loathe big oil or oppose nuclear power, but how are we going to generate all the energy we need to facilitate our modern high consumption lifestyle? Moreover, demand is rising as millions of people in what we used to call the Third World now want to emulate the materialistic lifestyle they see via a multitude of media, observe in the wealthier suburbs of their cities and hear about from friends and relatives who have moved to Europe or North America. Just as billions seek to live the American dream, millions of low and medium-skill occupations are being automated. No sooner have hundreds of thousands of new immigrants gained temporary employment Uber cab drivers undercutting traditional taxi drivers in cities as diverse as London, New York or Paris as Uber itself, once a great proponent of relaxed migration controls, announces plans to phase in driverless cars. It's only a matter of time before many other mundane jobs that involve a degree of mental and physical dexterity beyond the capabilities of first generation domestic robots give way to smart automata. As time goes by, I forecast only three categories of remunerative jobs will remain outside low-tech backwaters:

Research and development
Social monitoring
Persuasion (consultancy, change management, awareness raising, marketing, entertainment)

All three overlapping sectors of human enterprise will require either an exceptionally high IQ or outstanding talents. This effectively means within the next generation (usually around 25 to 30 years) only a small minority will pursue competitive careers to boost their status and/or income. Underemployment is the one problem that laissez-faire capitalism cannot address. Unless capitalism, albeit with large conglomerates and substantial state intervention, can motivate most of its economic participants, it will implode as the workless masses fail to respond to its incentives.

Universal Welfarism

Now, more and more big business leaders are coming out in favour of universal basic income, which could transform most adults from active participants in a competitive economy to passive consumers and guinea pigs in a giant social engineering experiment. In reality most citizens of Western countries struggle to compete in the labour market and the hundreds of millions of third worlders aspiring to the American way of life may never get a chance to earn a living. Currently in the UK you have to earn more than 35K a year on average to contribute more in taxes than you consume in services. The maths is not that hard. Public spending stands at a whopping 780 billion for the year 2016/17, that's 23 thousand per worker in direct and indirect tax. Yet the average wage is still around 28K. That means most workers are already subsidised and rewarded more for compliance or good behaviour than actual work that really contributes to society. The range of jobs available at the lower end of the salary scales becomes more absurd by the day. Rather than serve customers at checkout tills, shop assistants now monitor automated checkouts. Soon rather than stacking shelves, supermarket workers will monitor shelf-stacking robots. More and more work not only in customer relations, but in the mushrooming awareness raising business. That's right, people get paid for promoting a concept or a lifestyle option rather than a tangible good or service. Expect this number to grow as the boundary between voluntary political activism and subsidised lifestyle evangelism blurs. Who could seriously believe that the likes of Oxfam, Save the Children or Medicins sans Frontiers are funded mostly by voluntary donations from cash-strapped private citizens? Who decided to use their finite resources to hire ships to facilitate mass migration from Northern Africa to Europe, often against the wishes of local authorities on the ground. Well-funded NGOs have been caught colluding with people traffickers within Libya's coastal waters, effectively acting as a ferry service under the pretext of saving lives. To understand the scale of the problem before us, just consider the population of Nigeria alone is rising by 4 to 5 million a year and is projected to hit 300 million by 2036, almost entirely due to a high fertility rate that has not fallen in line with a massive decline in infant mortality and an equally impressive rise in mean life expectancy. Worse still Nigeria is now a net importer of food and domestic demand for energy is growing faster than the proceeds of its substantial but finite oil reserves. It may soon be unable to sustain its increasingly urbanised citizens. Could we not better empower Africans by promoting sustainable development through lower fertility rates? There are two ways to attain these ends. One is through more military interventionism, e.g. meddling in the many civil wars erupting in countries under significant environmental stress or forcing local governments to implement the LGBTQ+ agenda. The other approach is simply to leave these people alone and let them find their own route towards a more sustainable future, but without us relying on their natural resources. Unfortunately, isolationism and protectionism have earned a bad name. Simple leaving the Middle East and West Africa to rot in their own environmental nightmare will not prevent civil wars and human misery, but it may stop such mayhem spreading to the more stable societies of Western Europe and North America, thus preserving the liberal traditions we hold dear and setting an example for others to follow. Besides coercion is not necessary to transition from high to low birth rates. Most European countries now have fertility rates below replacement level as the relative cost of raising a child rises. As we adapt to a future where only highly educated professionals can earn a living through their own endeavours, why would we have more children than we can reasonably nurture? If we rely on the State to bring up our children and inculcate in them new cultural values at odds with our instincts, why should we bother having children at all?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/gEPdOZbyzbw

Communism for the Masses and Liberalism for the Elite

If you ever aspired to democratic socialism, the last 40 years have been very disappointing, as mainstream social democratic parties have embraced big business and the USSR collapsed. Nothing ever seems to change unless banking cartels and tech giants want it. Have they concluded that the masses can no longer compete in the free market?

It saddens me to admit it, but I once hoped capitalism would give way to anarcho-communism, a patchwork of egalitarian communes in a utopian world devoid of armies and extreme concentrations of wealth. In my naive adolescent mindset the Soviet Union, the People Republic of China, Cuba and North Korea were at best deformed workers' states and at worst despotisms antithetical to the kind of laid-back sharing society I envisaged. Ironically the only viable examples of communalism have always sprung from close-knit and culturally homogenous communities, i.e. people who share an elaborate set of ethical rules and customs. Once such societies grow beyond a basic level of complexity and have to accommodate a wider range of cultural backgrounds and social attitudes, they inevitably have to adopt more coercive means to maintain social stability. Yet if such societies fail to grow out of their rudimentary forms, they will inevitably fail to develop the technological means to improve people's quality of life and to correct the cruel injustices of mother nature. Ever since the industrial revolution, no system has succeeded in raising people's material living standards more than capitalism. Even China abandoned its Maoist command economy to embrace state-managed capitalism. Today, the State accounts for a larger share of the economy in most of Western Europe than it does in China. Yet as corporate cartels behave more like governments via their NGOs and transnational organisations, we may soon see a merger between the Chinese and European models with democracy reduced to little more than choreographed consultation exercises. Competition will work on two levels. The professional elite of technical whizz-kids, scientists, social planners, media executives and entertainers will continue to compete and lead parallel lives in a liberal bubble with exclusive access to secluded resorts and gated neighbourhoods. Meanwhile the masses reliant on UBI (universal basic income) will be rewarded for their compliant behaviour. Some may attain relative privileges by acting as model citizens, while others will be relegated to a closely supervised life in an urban jungle of interconnected megacities. Those who fail to comply, especially those whose dissident ideas attract a following, may be treated as sufferers of mental disorders. The hate speech laws now being enforced in countries as diverse as Canada, Turkey, Germany and China, could effectively disable you as a citizen in our basic income panacea. Just imagine the option of either repenting one's conservative views on the sexual dimorphism of human beings or having one's bank account deactivated and access to social housing and employment denied. This dystopian future is no longer just a fanciful science fiction, but a reality the Pentagon is preparing for.

Tags All in the mind, capitalism, communism, Computing, corporatism, migration, Power dynamics, violence, war

Power Dynamics

Who’s really behind Momentum ?

Post author By neilg63
Post date 16th July 2017
No Comments on Who’s really behind Momentum ?

How former Blairites morphed into radical advocates of a borderless utopia

Politics is really the art of winning influence over other power brokers to further one's true agenda, which may be self-aggrandisement, commercial interests or the pursuit of long-term ideological change. Personally I think most politicians fall into the first category of wishful thinking opportunists, eager to make a few gestures to please their electoral base, but more concerned with their career. Over the last century or more it seems it hardly matters who wins parliamentary elections, big business will always get its way anyway. The old dichotomy of a state-interventionist redistributionist Labour Party and a more laissez-faire pro-business Conservative Party was always a mere façade. In reality big business supported most of Labour's radical social transformation policies. The age of mass consumerism required a compliant but contented populace, something that naked capitalism could never provide left to its own devices. Indeed welfare dependency rose fastest not in the 1960s or 70s under Labour, but in the 80s under Margaret Thatcher as manufacturing moved overseas.

In the last two years British politics has undergone some quite unexpected realignments. The reemergence of Left Labour as a major force in British politics under veteran backbench rebel Jeremy Corbyn has taken many by surprise. Labour now has over 600,000 members, mainly critical of Tony Blair's legacy as a poodle of US foreign policy and big business. Back in 2003 many Momentum supporters would have marched against the US-led invasion of Iraq. I remember powerful speeches from the late Tony Benn, a younger Jeremy Corbyn and a grandiloquent George Galloway. The protest attracted broad support from disparate groups. The two most visible contingents were the far left, in their neo-Trotskyite and neo-Stalinist incarnations, and the Muslim Council of Britain. We also had a lower-key ensemble of mainly middle class Greens and left Labour activists embarrassed with their leadership. However, most participants were just well-intentioned teachers, social workers, charity workers, learning support assistants and even a few with normal jobs who were like me just generally disgusted with the idea that our government was about to authorise a military intervention that would likely trigger a wider conflict. Two years later the British electorate gave Tony Blair's government a reduced majority, but with just 35% of popular vote (and only 21.5% of potential voters). Many left-of-centre opponents of the war such as myself voted either Liberal Democrat or SNP in protest. When the Labour lost to a Conservative-led coalition with the Liberal Democrats in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, this rainbow coalition regrouped to oppose cuts in social services, welfare and the perceived privatisation of healthcare. Nonetheless the general public had little appetite for a traditional left platform that might include the re-nationalisation of privatised services and industries, much higher taxes for the rich and massive cuts in defence spending. On this latter point many fail to realise that while conservative public opinion tends to oppose military adventurism in far-flung places, it's all in favour of defending the realm. In power New Labour seemed to take the opposite approach overstretching limited military resources in numerous conflicts around the globe, while failing to defend national borders, literally instructing border officers to wave through new migrants with minimal checks. Amazingly working class voters were much more concerned with social cohesion in Birmingham, Bradford or Luton than media reports of atrocities in Baghdad, Kabul or Pristina.

We may speculate that social media has played a major role in building support for the various causes that tend to inspire virtue-signalling trendy lefties. However, this apparent shift may reflect the changing strategies of corporate wheelers and dealers eager to undermine the residual power of national governments and replace traditional cultures with a global superculture.

Since the fall of the former Soviet Union, Marxism has kept a low profile, despite the fact many Western far-leftists had long distanced themselves from Stalinism. In Britain the Socialist Workers Party used the slogan Neither Washington Nor Moscow but International Socialism. As early as the 1930s Antonio Gramsci realised the workers would not rise up to overthrow their capitalist overlords, without a cultural revolution. Ironically Mussolini's government pioneered a close collaboration between the state and large companies, known as corporativismo, although in Italian a corporazione was not a limited liability company, but a state entity that coordinated smaller industrial concerns. Nonethless mid 20th century fascist regimes believed strongly in close liaison between the state and private enterprise. They viewed democracy as an illusion and tended to prefer plebiscites as a form of patriotic consultation. Gramsci feared that a workers' uprising in the more advanced capitalist countries would result in the kind of national statism we saw both in the German Third Reich and Stalin's Russian Empire. Many of us misunderstood what Marxism really meant. Marx did not argue for an all-powerful national state to protect the interests of local workers against predatory global corporations. Instead he argued that modern capitalism would inevitably yield to socialism, which in turn would eventually evolve into stateless communism, in the same way as primitive communism (based on an idealised Rousseauian view of early humanity) gave way to slave societies, feudalism and later, following the industrial revolution, capitalism. Early Marxists concerned themselves as much with culture as with economics. In 1884 Friedrich Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State advocating the eventual dissolution not only of private property, but of nation states and families. Engels genuinely envisioned a world free of economic, ethnic or sexual hierarchies where we would be motivated not by personal betterment, familial or tribal advantage, but by the progress of humanity as a whole. Over the last 120 years Marxists have mainly debated how to achieve these ends.

As the student-led protest movements of the 1960s failed to inspire the working classes of Western Europe, who despite their daily struggles were by and large glad they did not live on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Marxist Left, still strong in Italy and France, devised a new strategy, Eurocommunism, which advocated a mixed economy and gradual social reform. Indeed on practical policies little distinguished the Italian and French Communist Parties from their social democratic cousins in Britain or West Germany, where local communist parties struggled to win popular support. On the great divide between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, the mainstream Labour Party remained staunchly Atlanticist in outlook. The Eurocommunists simply recognised that the Soviet Union could not serve as a model that would unite the working classes of the West with their comrades in the developing world. Their aims had not changed, only their strategy. Yet among a small clique of intellectuals in the Labour Party and the tiny CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain), the New Left exerted much influence via organs such as the Socialist Register and later Red Pepper. One such intellectual was the late Ralph Miliband, born in Belgium to Polish Jewish parents who later migrated to England 1940 to escape Nazi persecution. He remained a committed Marxist until his death in 1994, having published numerous articles and books on Marxist theory. He was a close confidant of historian Eric Hobsbawm, who notably sympathised with the former USSR, and the radical Fabian, Tony Benn. In recent years the Miliband brand has been more associated with Ralph's sons, David and Ed. As Labour leader from 2010 to 2015, Ed Miliband tried to distance himself from Tony Blair's military adventurism. However, his brother not only supported the Iraq War, but willingly served as Foreign Secretary working alongside Hillary Clinton to promote commercial and military globalisation. After narrowly losing to his brother in the Labour leadership contest, David Miliband accepted a well-remunerated role in New York as CEO of the International Rescue Committee, which seeks to aid refugees worldwide. Earlier David had worked as Tony Blair's head of policy from 1994 to 2001, when he became an MP.

To most Momentum activists, Tony Blair is nothing but a traitor to the causes of social justice and international peace. However, the young Aaaron Bastini, one of the masterminds behind Momentum, opted in 2010 to support David rather than Ed Miliband. I mean at least the latter decried the Iraq War. Did Mr Bastani suddenly have an epiphany before he embraced Jeremy Corbyn's idealism only five years later? This would seem a rather odd move as most of us tend more to idealism in our youth. Not surprisingly two of the other leading lights in the People's Momentum, Adam Klug and James Schneider hail from the same upmarket districts of North London as the Milibands. Small world, isn't it?

One may wonder how both Tony Blair and Tony Benn could belong to the Fabian Society or how the son of Marxist scholar could embrace early 21st century US imperialism, while one of his close associates backed a longstanding opponent of US imperialism as Labour leader. Here it is important to understand that most Marxist strategists are not pacifists. They are quite prepared to support military might if the outcome is more likely to pave the way to international socialism. Indeed over the decades self-professed Marxists have adopted some startling positions on global conflicts. The British Communist Party failed to support the Second World War until Hitler's invasion of the Ukraine and Western Russia. Meanwhile some former Trotskyists, while opposing US imperialism before the fall of Soviet Union, became cheerleaders of US-led global policing operations ever since, most notably the late Christopher Hitchens who supported the 2003 Iraq War to defeat the looming danger of Islamism. However, the globalist left remained bitterly divided over military interventionism in the Middle East. They had to support both global cultural convergence through mass migration and the projection of Western values on the rest of the world on the one hand and appease the growing Muslim lobby at home on the other.

Every problem in the world today seems to demand one solution, more globalisation. It doesn't matter whether it's climate change, unemployment, unsustainable debt, regional wars, organised crime or terrorism, our main media outlets, national governments and global institutions just propose tighter international integration and the undermining of traditional nation states and support structures. The growing concentration of power in a handful of high tech multinationals naturally demands greater coordination of governments to regulate them and prevent tax evasion. It should really not surprise us that the New Left does not advocate the nationalisation of Google, Amazon, Microsoft or Tesco. It needs these profitable organisations to bankroll its social engineering plans. And it appears it's succeeding. Big business has for some time not just embraced rapid cultural change, but openly promoted it.

Ahead of the Curve

Momentum has cultivated an anti-establishment reputation, often accusing the BBC of bias and openly campaigning against what it sees as reactionary newspapers or political organisations. I've lost count of the number of online petitions against the Daily Mail or Nigel Farage. Yet one only needs to watch a BBC soap opera to understand the convergence of the BBC's social agenda and Momentum's objectives. Both support open door immigration. Both welcome the ethnic transformation of British cities. Both support greater state intervention in people's private lives. Both support the concept of multiculturalism, while also promoting the dissolution of traditional family structures at odds with practically all traditional cultures. However, the BBC still has to offer the pretence of impartiality and patriotism. It only seems yesterday when each evening of televisual broadcasts would end with the national anthem. Now we have 24/7 news, non-stop sports, endless repeats of soap operas and pop concerts.

Rebranding Globalism

Behind the scenes the leading proponents of Blair's third way do not really disagree with Labour's radical rebranding. They may complain about Corbyn's irresponsible spending plans or his opposition to Britain's expensive token nuclear deterrent, but actually such disagreements may not matter as much as we might like to think. The current debate about Britain's exit from the European Union has only exposed just how little independence once powerful nation states really have. It seems without the oversight of one supranational organisation or another, the country will grind to a halt. Vegetables will rot in the fields and sick patients will be left untreated because of a lack of migrant farm labourers and nurses willing to serve us tirelessly. You see both Blairites and Momentum activists love mass migration, because they hope the ensuing social dislocation will let them turbo-charge their vision of a socialist utopia, bankrolled by the same corporate behemoths they claim to loathe.

Of course, some people will always be more equal than others.

Tags capitalism, communism, corporatism, lobby, media, Power dynamics, sustainability, war