Gentle Rebuttals

Hah, the title says Butt.

So I found it difficult to pick an individual topic - so instead I am going to go through several smug statements that I have seen or heard people use, and... well, gently rebut them.

This is mostly to clear noise from my brain on various topics, but if anyone else might derive joy or use from it, well, that's a bonus.

Don't try to play this as a drinking game though; you'll just get sad that you've heard so many of these sayings banded about.

"If my pants can't stop a fart, how can a mask stop COVID-19?"

This comes from a basic lack of understanding as to the size difference between COVID and other very small things. COVID-19 measures at 120 nanometers across (for comparison, a human hair is 80,000 nanometers across). The methane that gives a fart its smell is 0.38 nanometers across - COVID-19 is over three hundred times bigger.

To illustrate why cloth can stop one but not the other...

If we imagine that this basketball is the same size as methane, then comparatively, COVID-19 is the size of St Paul's Cathedral.

Now imagine fitting St Paul's Cathedral through a basketball hoop.

You're welcome.

"Charity begins at home."

This probably began as a warning about looking after your own finances before you bail out anyone else. 1 Timothy in the Bible actually addresses this, chapter 5, verse 8:

"But if any provide not for his owne, & specially for those of his owne house, hee hath denied the faith, and is worse then an infidel."

And in terms of personal finances, this is great. This is key. If you aren't fiscally stable, and you risk that stability further by giving to other people, you reduce your capability to do more good in the long run for yourself and others.

However, national economies do not work like personal finances, which is something I will touch upon later - and I only ever see this phrase rolled out when someone speaks about providing charitable aid to other nations that are significantly worse off than we are.

A lot of those nations are worse off specifically because of their past... let's call them... interactions with nations such as ours or those like ours. Our nations, which are correspondingly more historically wealthy because of those interactions, are filled with people that say that charity begins at home.

This is a short format, so going into things like the East India Trading Company and the Belgian Congo would take up too much space - but if you fancy a little eye-opener on the topic, have a google.

"Cancel culture has gone too far."

Almost everyone has participated in cancel culture at one point or other, it just wasn't called that.

Why do you go to eat at one place instead of the one down the road? Why do you use one brand of toothpaste rather than another? Why do you watch one news channel and avoid its competitor?

We make decisions about what products and services to use and consume on a daily basis, and some of our reasoning is conscious, and some of it is subconscious. For example, if you have a four-hob oven, one of them is your favourite, and you probably can't explain why.

If you have ever articulated a negative or positive opinion about something, you have participated in cancel culture. Think of a band you don't like. Think of why you don't like them. If you've told another human being that reason, you've participated.

For example. This guy. Not actually very funny when it comes down to it.

Bam, I am one of those awful cancellers you have heard so much about.

If you don't like a celebrity for whatever reason, and you say so, you are participating. For reasons as diverse as "I didn't like the last movie they were in" or "They aren't actually very funny" or "They have faced serious and credible allegations of assaulting their spouse" or "They're a bit of a lefty who keeps virtue signalling" or "They are a bit creepy" or "They treat my friends as not being actually human" - you say that to someone, that is cancel culture.

But then people wanted to keep liking the people that other people didn't like, so there needed to be a witty phrase to sum up this apparent war - that way it could be tied into "Political Correctness Gone Mad," which I might touch on later. And so, the phrase Cancel Culture became pejorative, just like Social Justice Warrior. Because it was useful to throw around as an accusation or insult, rather than a description of complex human behaviour.

Money is the primary driving force of much of the world, and a lot of us don't have very much of it. Pointing out something that a person or corporation did - like, actually did - and then making a decision on whether or not to support them financially based on that information is okay, frankly.

I think, perhaps, the complaint comes from the fact that some people feel one of two ways: 1) that the entity in question wasn't wrong to do what it did, or 2) that the entity was wrong but they shouldn't suffer any negative repercussions for it.

By that same virtue, you should always buy bad products that don't actually do what they propose to do, because holding the manufacturer accountable for the product being not fit for purpose is Cancel Culture and wrong. Don't like Pot Noodle? Tough, go buy a four pack of Chicken & Mushroom.

That's how you sound.

"If voting changed anything they'd make it illegal."

If voting didn't change anything "They" wouldn't spend literally millions every budget trying to convince you to vote a certain way. Trust me, they'd rather not. They'd rather you didn't vote at all, which is why millions is also spent trying to make voters apathetic and make voting difficult for people. If voting didn't change anything, the US Government wouldn't be closing polling booths in areas that don't classically vote Republican.

"I don't see colour."

That isn't a clever way to say you aren't racist. That's a way to wash your hands of engagement when it comes to racial discrimination that very much exists and is ongoing at this very second. Saying you don't see colour means you don't acknowledge that other people very much do, and those people are often in positions of power over those whose colour they VERY MUCH see.

File this with "We're All One Race, The Human Race" and "All Lives Matter".

"If you haven't done anything wrong then you have nothing to worry about."

This one I see rolled out to defend overbearing police powers and surveillance. Usually by people who have never been persecuted, or never seen the wrong side of the law. It's actually very easy to break the law, and that's before even thinking about what happens if the laws change once the Omniscient CCTV Network is installed.

Even given that, miscarriages of justice happen literally every day; and abuses of power of every kind are also a daily occurrence. You do not want to hand that kind of power over to a group of people, even if you think you can trust them - because can you trust all of them? All it takes is one bad apple to spoil the bunch, after all; and if 99 out of the 100 people that can observe every moment of your life are trustworth, that means that 1 of them isn't, and has totally unfettered access to you.

You think it's awkward and cringeworthy when that guy that gives you weird vibes is going through your facebook and liking every image of you in a bikini since you joined? Imagine if he works for whoever has access to that information.

Besides, you should never imagine how the current administration - or how a good administration - will use a particular set of powers and privileges. Instead, imagine how a more abusive or harsh administration will. Imagine how a corporation will. Now understand that it is far more likely that a more repressive government will seize power in such an environment, or that the government will privatise their police/surveillance services.

This is key, when imagining powers that a government can have. Don't imagine them in the hands of the good guys in a sci fi movie. Imagine them in the hands of the worst people you can imagine, because there's never a zero chance that those people won't be running your country one day - and if there is a system they can abuse, they will.

"Back in MY day..."

Back in YOUR day was probably awful too, even if it wasn't awful for you. Right now you're remembering riding your bike around and having fun and laughing with your friends, not the fact that husbands would beat their wives with total impunity and children with learning difficulties got locked in their rooms and treated like subhumans. Have a word with yourself.

"Who's going to pay for it?"

The government, which they will find a lot easier than you think, because - newsflash - national budgets don't operate like personal finances.

You see, governments operate in deficit almost all the time. The British economy has only emerged from budget deficit for about five years out of the past forty. (It bears mention that the most recent patch of that, 1999-2001, was just after a Labour government took over from a Conservative one.)

If you try doing that, the bank gets really angry at you and men with hobnail boots show up on your door asking about you.

See, the government also controls the creation of new money. It can do this whenever it wants. Governments do it all the time. Constantly. They don't operate to the same budget as you or me - the primary thing that limits the creation of new money is the risk of creating inflation. Of course, that can be pretty damn damaging in and of itself - there's an entire list of places that have been damaged by hyperinflation here, which will also cover the various reasons why it happened.

(It bears mention that one of the key examples in there is Zimbabwe - whose hyperinflation event was caused by the UK ending a series of agreements between Robert Mugabe and Margaret Thatcher to redistribute farmland. This interfered drastically with food prices. What made this worse was multinational companies that Zimbabwe relied on started hoarding their goods beyond the country's borders, which tanked the economy, which lead to the mass printing of currency, so on, so on. Sure, economies can go bad for internal reasons, but to really screw everything up, you need foreign corporations to get involved!)

So. Assuming that your economy isn't actually stalled, or hurtling out of control, or spiralling to the ground like Icarus with a blob of warm waxy feathers on his back, perhaps one can risk some inflation.

Even if they are unwilling to make cuts in places that they could afford to make cuts - yes, Trident, I'm fucking looking at you - the notion of a governmental budget operating like a guy with eat beans in his pocket is just absolutely fallacious.

It's been very convenient for various right-wing and conservative entities to have people think this way, though. Super convenient. It's why people will believe austerity is a necessary evil, rather than an ideological, chosen evil. And it's why I say, the resources always exist - all that is lacking is the will to use them.

"I just wish they'd keep politics out of my [whatever]."

Politics has been in your [whatever] since your [whatever] was first conceived of. You just haven't felt uncomfortable seeing it or thinking about it,  because you weren't disadvantaged by it. Skunk Anansie said it best, so I will let them cover this point for me.

So there we have it. A variety of gentle (some more gentle than others) rebuttals.

I mean, I feel a little better.

Thank you for reading. Support your humble author via Patreon or Kofi, or follow social media on the right. See you next week.

Faster To Breaking Point

Accelerationism (Noun): The idea that either the prevailing system of capitalism, or certain technosocial processes that historically characterised it, should be expanded and accelerated in order to generate radical social change.

How many of you have heard of Accelerationism?

It's a thing that comes up every now and then in political or economic or sociological discussion. Nietzche and Marks both discussed it in their day, though perhaps without the very specific meaning that it seems to have today.

For a patented low-fi example of how this works...

Let's say you and your friends are all playing Risk.

You don't... want to be playing Risk, though.

Everyone else does. Everyone else is having a good time - they're making sound strategic plays, not over-extending themselves, defending their base lines and waiting for everyone else to make their mistakes. This game is going to drag out for a while, and they're all okay with this.

You want to play Monopoly, though - or at least you think it is going to be Monopoly. You didn't all really discuss what to do after Risk, but you know that at least one of the group has a Monopoly box, and you are REALLY good at Monopoly. You probably won't win Risk - you will almost certainly win Monopoly.

So you start playing a little less carefully.

You start over-extending yourself, practically inviting other players to try and break into your territory. You sally against hard targets, maybe throwing 10 into an opposing 10 without any hope of winning, just to whittle them down. You are making plays that are very suboptimal, very high risk with potentially slightly high reward.

It leads to instability. People start making cheap gains off you, or taking from the others who you have weakened. By your death throes - because you WILL lose at this rate - you make the game end a lot quicker. You accelerate the pace of the game, by removing the checks and measures implied and inherent, i.e. that players won't make dumb decisions.

You lost the game of Risk, but you won the game of playing something else.

Hopefully, that'll be Monopoly, right?

Right?

Put simply - it's the process of making a system run faster and harder, until it breaks. So you can access what is after that system.

Notably it's the right wing of the spectrum that leans heavily on Accelerationism. Not that there aren't left-wing adherents - numerous and sundry thinkers have espoused it - but it finds its core market in the place that is already most benefited by the system to be accelerated. That is, white nationalists and capital-fascists.

The system is already hurting the people they want to hurt, see. All those Risk pieces that get taken off the board as you make the fast plays, the stupid plays, the risky plays - they aren't what those kind of people like to think of AS "people".

All acceptable losses to get to what they think is next.

Books have been written about what is next. There's a lot of different perspectives. Paul Mason (author of a book called Postcapitalism from 2015) argued that the digital economy and people relying on co-operatives and mutual aid rather than going to their traditional capitalist benefactors would see the end of our current model and the rise of something more egalitarian and just.

Of course there's big steps to make that not happen. The undermining of every social justice programme, the sabotage of experiments into universal income and ignoring the experiments that work, the definition of everything that levels the playing field as being socialist and the definition of socialist as being inherently evil. Like, this is McCarthyism stuff, you hate to see it.

Nevertheless. Whenever you see a relaxation in trade rules to benefit the seller, or a removal of regulations between owner and profit, or a tax efficiency being exploited, or whatever Amazon is fucking doing next, remember: this is acceleration.

And those doing it really hope they can exploit what happens next.

Just like this guy.

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Part Of A Montage

I am fairly sure that everyone has seen at least one movie which is set after something really awful happens to the world.

It happens in TV shows, movies, the works; and when it happens, often, we are treated to an explanation as to why. (Sometimes we just aren't, which has a varied level of success in terms of storytelling.) Sometimes, the Why is conveyed with a minimum of exposition, and is shown to you via the storytelling in the world as it stands now, like in (picture above) 28 Days Later. Sometimes, the Why is told to you by LITERAL exposition, such as in Mad Max, when the story of what happened to everything is conveyed to the watcher by a narrator.

A more modern technique, though - something that has come about due to our increasing savvy nature with news media, being able to recognise certain tropes, and having over fifty years experience with watching how events have panned out in the news - is to cram the beginning two minutes (and half the opening credit sequence) with a jumbled montage of news clips detailing precisely how we went from "The World We Live In Right Now" to "The World In The Movie, Which Is Awful".

Here's an example - the opening to the 2004 remake of Dawn Of The Dead.

In the movie, this has to convey a lot of information to us relatively quickly - or at least, it has to give us a sense of what is going on. We have to feel unsafe, we have to understand that social order is breaking down, and we have to have a vague idea as to what has caused this to occur.

It all flashes by, and bam. There we are, watching Max Rockatansky hurtle down the highway at 90, or seeing how someone survived the first ten minutes of a zombie outbreak, or listening to an emergency session of the UN talking about their "only possible solution".

It's a good trick. It puts us into the world, into that mindset of everything going wrong, of the entire construct being turned up on its head - without making us live through it. It gives just a taste of the barren wasteland we are about to march into, before the protagonists show up.

That's why it has to be quick, see - or it gets bleak, and we realise we don't actually want to stick around to see it get worse.

Has anyone else seen the news headlines recently?

I know, we aren't looking at the world being torn apart by a zombie apocalypse - but we are seeing a lot of shit going wrong, and a lot of stuff creeping towards going more wrong.

Of course, the problem with this is that those news headlines - the ones that are crammed into about a minute's worth of footage to show society spiralling down the toilet before the narrative solution presents itself - is that they are spread out throughout our normal, day-to-day lives, which are tiring and long things, filled with their own concerns.

To take a hop sideways, to the beginning paragraph of The Call Of Cthulhu, 1928:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

It IS hard to draw correlation, to paint an accurate picture of where the world is going, when one is living in it. We don't have information about absolutely everything that would help us make decisions or come to decent conclusions. There is a LOT of misinformation out there, too - some of it deliberate, some of it less malevolent.

Some of us, though, are on the contact edge of the bad shit that is happening.

A bout of collective amnesia descends on all those who help to contribute to xenophobia the moment something awful happens to... well, those that they are xenophobic against. They hope that, because now they are saying the right words about the awful thing that just happened, we won't remember that - actually - they were talking shit about the culture the victims belong to not so long ago.

In the montage of the world ending, we would see a three-second clip of a politician being blatantly Islamophobic like oh I don't know let's say Fraser Anning, an Australian senator who has gone on record as stating that "Islam is on a mission to take over the Western world and implement sharia law".

We would then see the aftermath of the Christchurch shooting, in which fifty innocent Muslims were murdered. The correlation would be absolutely obvious.

This isn't the beginning of a movie.

We are living this, day and night. We are seeing people being hurt and killed. We are seeing people driven into poverty, driven to starvation. We are seeing military campaigns against people just trying to live. We're seeing those responsible wave away that responsibility and do whatever they can to just keep hold of what they have, to sock away just a little more into a nice bank account, to push just a little more of their agenda before they can slink away out of the public eye.

For some of us, we feel the anxiety that the world is facing collapse soon, maybe imminently.

For some of us, the world came to a literal stop on Friday.

So how do we stop the montage running before more of us pay the price?

I won't end this blog with my usual exit spiel. It seems trite.

Just... please. Do what you can to make things better.