The Age of Dodgyology

We’re living, as the alleged Chinese curse is supposed to say, in interesting times. Despite having near-instantaneous access to a vast global repository of information and opinion, a technological miracle in itself that is not nearly as appreciated as it should be, we seem to get stuck with the most ridiculous nonsensical positions that end up dominating the discourse.

I want to call all these new frameworks that seem to rigidly limit our thinking dodgyologies because they’re dodgier than the iPhone 25 I bought at an Asian market. But perhaps a better term would be sloganology. They are usually referred to as being an ideology of some kind (eg gender ideology) but that term seems to give them more intellectual weight than they truly deserve.

We’ve got all this info floating about, Zettabytes of the bloody stuff, yet we’re lacking in the three D’s of discernment, discrimination and detail.

The details are there (mostly) but we end up with moronic shit like

From the river to the sea
Trans rights are human rights
A threat to our democracy
Nobody is safe until everybody is safe
. . . (and so on)

If you’re ‘lucky’ you might get a bit more. You might get the superbly sneaky phrases like “experts say” or “studies have shown” thrown in for good measure.

Furthermore, almost the entirety of our discourse has been shaped by a whole bunch of concepts that sound ‘weighty’ and erudite, but are often nothing more than vague incomplete descriptors at best. These terms get accepted as being real, concrete and objective things when many of them are, in reality, questionable hypotheses, again at best.

Take just one of these myriad concepts that shape our discourse; systemic racism. This concept actually has some merit; but only some. This encapsulates the idea that the various ‘systems’ that exist somehow disfavour a group of people based on the colour of their skin. This kind of thing was certainly true when actual laws were discriminatory. You could point to the effing words and see it. Right there. There’s the racism.

Systemic racism, today, is a much subtler thing. According to ‘scholars’ like Kendi the mere existence of some inequality on racial lines is evidence that such systemic racism exists. If you ask the question of, precisely, where in this ‘system’ is the racism to be found it is not always so easy pinpoint.

You can easily create a law or a system that favours the more economically well-off. A bank, for example, might offer a lower interest rate on a loan for customers it assesses to be of lower risk, which would be those on higher incomes in stable jobs. The systemic racism ‘happens’ because, as a group, black people are more likely to be in a lower socio-economic class and so such a ‘system’ would be described as being “systemically racist”.

This loan ‘system’ would be said to be unjust because it discriminates against poorer people and is ‘racist’ by extension because, percentage-wise, it will disproportionally affect black people.

At least with this kind of example you can see where they’re coming from. The ‘racism’ is not explicit but a kind of 2nd order consequence, if we’d even describe it as ‘racism’ at all¹. But then you get things like the absurdity of the assumption that requiring voter ID is systemically racist because, for some inexplicable reason, black people are less capable of obtaining government-issued ID.

We had a similar ‘equity-based’ idiocy in the UK when they made it illegal to charge more for car insurance based on sex. This despite women being, statistically, safer drivers and consequently of lower insurance risk. The net result is that the safer drivers (women) now subsidize the more unsafe drivers (men). The disparity largely occurs because young men, in particular, tend to go all a bit ‘Fast and Furious’ when they first get a car.

These dodgyologies take root and prove very hard to shift.

The whole depiction of Donald Trump as some figure of unspeakable evil and tyranny is a case in point. I’m not going to comment on whether his policies during his first term in office were good or bad for the US - I don’t know enough about them. But he had 4 years to live up to his fascistic, tyrannical, misogynistic, racist, neo-Nazi, white supremacist reputation - and I don’t think he came anywhere close.

Bombastic, clownish, crude, crass, narcissistic - these things might be justifiably levelled against him and his first term. But some kind of ‘Hitler’ figure?

Nor did the Demonic Destroyer of Democracy™ do any such thing. He was in power, for heaven’s sake, when the flustercuck that was the 2020 election occurred. And we might recall that he lost that one. Some ‘threat to democracy’, eh?

But he disagreed with the 2020 election results and called them illegitimate. Ipso facto he’s a fweat to democwathy. No one on the left would, of course, ever, ever, ever, question the legitimacy of an election or complain about things like Russian interference and try several times to get a sitting President impeached on the most spurious of grounds. They’re true defenders of democracy.

What are the ‘left’ worried about? That he might pressure social media companies to censor things, to deplatform users for saying the wrong things, or to use ‘hate speech’ as a weapon to silence dissent? That he might bring a bunch of farcical legal cases against his political opponents? That he might describe supporters of the opposing party as extremists and domestic terrorists?

Yeah - those kinds of things would certainly help to undermine democracy quite a bit.

Remind me again which President brought in all of those things?

And yet this notion that Trump is, somehow, a kind of existential threat to all sorts of things has become a kind of article of faith, a central part of the left’s catechism.

It has become a central plank of the current dodgyology surrounding Trump.

Here in the UK, David Lammy, our Foreign Secretary, the one responsible for our relations with other countries, has been defending remarks he made in 2018, quoted in the following pic

A profound threat to the international order, no less. And he also hates women. Unlike Starmer who loves all women - even those with penises.

But, as with something like systemic racism, you ask for detail. You ask precisely where is this threat, in which policy, and you’ll find platitudes and posturing. It’s the whole JK Rowling thing. It becomes an article of faith that Rowling spews hate and no evidence is ever required or necessary².

It’s kind of (darkly) amusing to recall the people who said that Trump would take us into WWIII as we stand, today, closer to that than we’ve ever been.

But those articles of faith cannot be shaken. Biden and his carers have steered us closer to Armageddon than we ever thought possible - but it’s Trump - he’s the real danger.

This kind of dodgyology would be funny were it not so serious.

And then, of course, we have the whole Trans Dodgyology. It doesn’t even make sense in its own terms³ - and yet it has warped our thinking and policy in far-reaching ways.

We have seen a kind of microcosm of how these dodgyologies and mythologies get established. Lucy Letby, a neonatal nurse dealing with extremely poorly babies, was convicted of killing 7 of them and has just been convicted of the attempted murder of another. The more I have read about the details of the case, the more firmly I have become convinced of her innocence.

Yet the UK press and media went into their usual hysterical overdrive, depicting Letby as some kind of depraved monster. Other than the ‘evidence’ that she was found guilty in a court of law there is not a single shred of evidence that she was such a monster. She seems to have been well-liked, dedicated, conscientious, and normal, and there is no other indication in her life that she is such a ‘monster’ - other than that she was convicted of crimes; convictions secured using the most circumstantial and statistically illiterate of reasoning.

But Trump was found ‘guilty’ of 34 felonies too. Special FrankenFelonies created exclusively for him.

Letby was convicted on prejudice and articles of faith - Trump has similarly been convicted both in the court and in the court of public opinion based on mere supposition and dodgyological positions.

If there’s any shred of optimism and hope from the recent assassination attempt on Trump, it’s that the rhetoric, the dodgyology, might get toned down a notch.

I doubt it, but it’s what needs to happen. Everywhere, not just in the US.

1. The problem here with describing some system like this as being systemically racist is that it’s not a property of the system itself, but the particular circumstance of a given demographic. Suppose some effort was made to raise this demographic so that they were no longer, in a statistical sense, disadvantaged economically. All of a sudden, without changing the supposedly ‘racist’ system itself, the system that was previously ‘racist’ is no longer racist at all.

2. No such evidence exists, of course, except in the minds of people who also happen to believe in innate gender identities like those of the Eunuch gender identity

3. For example, one’s gender identity, something that is heavily socially conditioned, is also said to be ‘innate’, but also changeable. One can even change, on a daily basis, between ‘innate’ genders. It’s a hot mess of rainbow-coloured bonkers.