Inciteful or Insightful?

Propaganda does work. The classic example of this in history can be seen in the political campaign to portray the unvaxxed Jews as spreaders of disease.

It doesn’t work on everybody, of course, but it works on enough to make it worthwhile.

Have a look at this video (1m 38s) produced 2 years ago and recently highlighted by Mathew Aldred.

Apparently, people posting “fake news” on social media is a bigger threat to “our democracy” than all the MSM¹ stations being told exactly what phrases to say on air and what to ‘report’ on.

Of course what they really mean is “a threat to our demagoguery”.

Although it’s been brewing for a while now, the recent riots in the UK have given the government the excuse it needed to take a sudden lurch full-Orwell.

They are in the process of clamping down on stuff that people post online. Some forms of speech² seem acceptable whereas others do not.

It’s quite OK to characterize those with concerns about immigration as being “far right”, but not OK to characterize the adherents of a certain religion as representing a similar danger.

I agree with neither of those generalizations, by the way.

We have some problems in the UK. We sure do. But let’s try to figure out what those problems actually are instead of inventing fantasy bogey-men all the time. This is something that infuriates me - because the cretinous ‘knee-jerk’ solutions that politicians usually come up with end up wasting a shit ton of money in ‘addressing’ completely the wrong things - because there’s been no attempt to find out the real issues.

These ‘solutions’ also very often make things worse.

Look at how much money we wasted during ‘covid’ by chasing after illusory phantoms. All that money, maybe as much as £500 billion, just thrown away to achieve absolutely nothing (in terms of improvement to public health).

This was just government money (i.e. the money that used to belong to tax payers) and says nothing about the crazy private expenditure on things like masks or plastic screens or hand sanitizer or one way stickers and the like.

We should also remember a certain Juicy character who had such difficulty in finding any real white supremacist racist thugs to shore up his fantasies of victimhood he had to import a couple³ from Nigeria to pretend-lynch him.

Have you ever seen such a dastardly pair of white supremacists? Indeed, it looks like one of them is wearing a hooded white thing - definite possible connections to the KKK there.

Here’s what our illustrious Prime Minister, Two-Tier Keir, had to say in a recent Tweet :

Thanks to our police forces, those who participate in violence online and offline will face the full force of the law.

How does one commit violence online?

Do the words leap off the screen and kick someone in those lady nuts, eh Keir?

What does “online violence” even mean?

If you have the stomach for it you can watch a short clip of (allegedly) an Imam in Birmingham UK describe the process (according to Sharia) of how a woman should be stoned to death.

Now, I’m fully aware that this is a minority view amongst Muslims. I’ve met many who are as horrified by this sort of thing as I am. But we need to know how much of a minority is this minority - and are we not right to have some serious concerns about importing people to the UK who hold these sorts of beliefs?

Is this kind of thing not every bit as dangerous as ‘far-right’ thuggery?

Is it incitement to violence, or just a devoted follower of the religion of peace expressing his (multicultural) view?

Is this not “inciting hate” against women who indulge in a bit of extra-marital hanky panky?

Here’s a religious leader basically telling people that certain women are so disgusting and vile that they don’t even deserve to live and that they should be killed in a barbaric manner. You are supposed to hate these people so much that you can stone them to death. And, remember folks, all lesbian sex is extra-marital sex within Islam because no same-sex marriages are allowed or recognized.

If we’re going to ‘do something’ about far-right thuggery (and we definitely should) should we not also ‘do something’ about people who hold views like this?

Instead, what we’ve seen over the last few days is a 55-year old woman being arrested for getting the name of the Southport attacker wrong in a single Tweet. She’s being investigated under the suspicion of inciting racial hatred.

Lumping people into the single monolithic block of “far right” is the very same thing “islamophobes” get accused of when they lump all Muslims into a single monolithic block.

What we need to do is to decide on which values we’re going to uphold as a nation - those things that define us and the people we want to be - and then take a long hard look at those who represent a threat to those values, irrespective of what they look like, what religion they follow, or what their political leaning is.

We need to ensure that all those who break the law and harm others (actual harm not some wishy-washy fantasy “online” harm, or the in-person hurty-words version of the same) are dealt with objectively and with an utterly even hand.

But based on Two-Tier Keir’s words so far, it doesn’t look like we’re going to get that.

I don’t think we have our immigration policy right in the UK. Personally, I think we need to call an immediate (temporary) halt and do some serious and proper analysis before deciding how to proceed.

For me it’s a practical issue. How does one import an extra nearly 700,000 people (according to official figures) in a single year⁴ and not put a strain on an already seriously strained set of resources? That’s like 5 Ipswiches⁵ worth in a single year!

I can understand why a lot of people are concerned about the issue, but that doesn’t justify torching hotels and rioting. That’s not at all acceptable.

The biggest threat by far, however, is not in these various minority groups who do dreadful things, but the consequences for the overwhelmingly peaceful majority.

As a result of the rioting we’re losing our ‘rights’ to properly express ourselves. Not that we have anything like the First Amendment here in the UK, sadly.

If your knee-jerk response is always to ban, ban, ban - then pretty soon you’re going to run out of things to limit and proscribe.

The answer isn’t to ban, but to inform.

All you do by banning stuff is to create massive resentment without solving any of the underlying issues at all.

By banning stuff, you inflame the tensions that you’re trying to reduce.

The way to reduce tensions is to talk about stuff, discuss facts and interpretations. We need decent education that helps people to think critically and not leap to any knee-jerk response.

Fuck me, I’m living in cloud-cuckoo land aren’t I?

What the UK government is telling us is that “your propaganda is not allowed, but our propaganda is”.

You know, when I was growing up it was always understood, although mum and dad didn’t exactly phrase things like this, that my actions and feelings were my responsibility.

The whole notion of ‘incitement’ and ‘online violence’ is predicated on the assumption that other people bear some responsibility for how I act or feel or think.

We are assumed to be utter morons who, upon seeing some vile racist screed, will immediately think “goodness me, that’s a good idea”.

That’s what governments really think of us - as childlike morons who are theirs to manipulate and control.

The idea that our government is there to serve us has long gone.

They’re just here to tell us what to do for our own good.

And yet propaganda does work - and is definitely inciteful rather than insightful. That’s why governments keep doing it. It’s not like they’re going to be prosecuted for it, is it?

1. The Main Synch Media?

2. Sentences containing the words “river” and “sea” seem to be quite alright even though we all know what this phrase really means

3. These were the redneck brothers Abimbola Osundairo and Olabinjo Osundairo

4. Net immigration into the UK in 2023

5. Ipswich is a medium-sized town in the UK with an estimated population of about 140,000 and about 40 square km in size.