200 WORDS On - Free Speech

Free speech is the foundation of a free, fair and democratic society. We’ve the right to express what we think, but its not just mouthing off, then walking away. Though willingness to engage in debate is a condition of free speech, we tend to dodge the slippery matter of justifying our opinions. Being held to account is not an optional extra, viewpoints need to be challenged.

You can say anything you wish, yet it’s not consequence free, nor absolute. Individual rights come with collective duties. If you encourage hatred, physical harm, death, defamation, sedition, or undermine the nations security or democracy, there's a consequence to that. Free speech has never come completely unfettered. The balance is re-struck all the time between self-expression and its legal limits.

Open discussion of issues is an ailing art. Fallacious views are best punctured through effective debate. Preemptively silencing those whose views we disagree with, evades the duty to establish what is true and of value. Social media, has created public forums for ignored sectors of society, though frequently fails the consequence, challenge and accountability test. If freedom of speech is to thrive in this digital age, we must better understand what its there for.

WATCHED - The Social Dilemma

If you've ever wondered how you became so addictied to your iPhone, iPad or tablet, then watch this documentary. Not long ago social media outlets had huge followings but the companies that owned them were financially precarious. They started to sell advertising space on their sites, monetising the attention span of their followers, They weren't only selling audience numbers, but also what you viewed, your interests and what you bought. They were selling you and your data. 

Google and Facebook developed algorithms that would push any material at you that, based on your previous activity, it thought you might like. The frequency of your time on the site became an additional sales tool to encourage advertising investment. You buy a kitchen knife online and end up getting sent adverts from sites selling scimitars and machetes. 

This development and monitoring of our activity on social media becomes it's reason to exist, sending us notification emails, posts, anything to keep you on the site looking, checking and giving it your attention. In this way we were all being trained in an addiction to social media. Compelled to look incase we are missing out on something.

Some of the individuals involved in the rolling out of these programming initiatives started to be uneasy at the unforseen consequences of them. The increasing prevalence of fake news, conspiracy theories, medical quackery and political manipulation of elections. Algorithms have no moral compass, they just keep shoveling any material they think you might like in your face. Its how Trump turned himself into the voice of the left out and disaffected, irrespective of this stance being fraudulent.

So people who self harm or feel suicidal get sent more posts from similarly desperate people. People with a grievance against individuals, races, religions or cultures receive posts from people holding similar intolerant viewpoints. The opinions we hold, right or wrong, true or false, get encouraged and sustained by other posts from like-minded folk. These opinion bubbles go largely unchallenged. The division between Us and Them, becomes ever more exaggerated and the common ground we share left unexplored or actively derided. What is disheartening is how social media companies still suffer from a huge degree of public denial about their culpability in this. 

What can you do? Well right now turn off as many notifications on your phone or tablet as you can. Minimise your engagement, try to train your self to check emails and social media only once or twice a day.  You could come off social media altogether or decide to use one not multiple outlets. I post primarily through this blog now. Everything you do online will be being monitored, so it's always best you take care what you put out there.  Post responsibly; think twice or thrice before you press send and publish - do you want this out there and why?  

Internet forums work because they flatter our self esteem, vanity and ego, that we and our opinions matter. It is something that I have to remind myself of quite frequently is, who cares? In the bigger scheme of life none of it matters. Don't take Trump as your role model, be self- censoring online.

Give this documentary a watch, it really is deeply insightful about why our civilisation and democracy has gone so seriously wonky lately. Its available to stream on Netflix.

200 WORDS ON - The Double Bluff Fraud

When you misrepresent who you are, what is happening, what other people need to do, you commit fraud, a con upon an individual, community or country. It's most commonly financial fraud, but can be political, sexual or institutional. It is lying for personal advantage. Fraud is corrosive because it not only betrays trust but undermines faith in what is true.

When fake news, fraud and brazen lying becomes as endemic as they are now, it is harder to ascertain exactly what is true. It corrupts political discourse when political leaders spread stories they know to be untrue, deliberately deploying misinformation into the public sphere.

The effectiveness of a fraud depends on the conviction with which the perpetrator tells the lie and how easily other individuals believe and spread it. Human kind is so easily self deluded, we often so want something to be true we'll turn the tables on the truth bearers and say it's they who are the fraudster's. But such delusion is different in intent to the double bluff fraud that's perpetrated by Trump and his political ilk. To knowingly spread malignant untruths to maintain political power, lays the foundations for the democratic fraud that is fascism.

WATCHED - Totally Under Control

To watch this documentary is also to observe oneself becoming more and more aggravated and despairing at seeing the missteps of the US response to Covid 19 unfold. It also makes you aware that there was something willfully perverse about how the Trump administration neglected established best practice in dealing with a pandemic. 

Compare this with South Korea's response which was swift, thorough and effective, led completely by it's science and health professionals, there was no substantial economic hit because it was dealt with so quickly. 

The US however handed over responsibility to implement there response to unqualified inexperienced people, who were primarily there because they were loyal political stooges. Trump publicly ridiculed and undermined the experience of his own best health professional advisors. Side tracked a public health lead strategy by handing things over to the private sector and big pharma to make money out of pushing the use of medicines it knew were ineffective against Covid. Delayed through neglect the implementation of an effective test and trace for weeks. Set every state against each other in a bidding war for PPE that pushed up the price of it and made those PPE supply companies even wealthier. 

Worse still is that elements of this strategy hold uncomfortable echoes of the corrupt practice in handing over the test and trace system to the private sector unchallenged, to the detriment of more locally based public health initiatives, that we've seen is somewhat endemic within our own UK governments response.

Its sobering  unedifying and a concerning thing to watch as political ideology holds the effectiveness of known scientific practice up for ransom. Available to stream on BBC IPlayer.

ARTICLE - The Stains of Empire

Once upon a time we controlled a vast empire, but we do no longer, Yet in our imaginations we are still empire builders, just ones who are down on our luck. This leaves our countries collective ego permanently bruised. The more we remain in this realm of loss, grieving, we stay stuck within a resentful state of denial and anger over it. The more we behave like petulant infants, the more foolish we look in the eyes of everyone else, except to ourselves. Our constant bragging and talking up our status as 'world beaters' appears as the ridiculous charade it is. We don’t drive the world's economy anymore. Paradoxically our present standing and influence in the world, though greatly diminished, remains utterly indebted to that past and the stains of an empire.

Full extent of the British Empire

History, truthfully told, informs us that how we behaved in order to create and maintain that empire, power and influence, came at a huge human cost. There is then a debt of guilt that we constantly try to squirm out of paying off, one we defer, deny or void transacting. Our conscience as a country will never be clear until we do. We continue to avert our gaze. When will we stop our sulking and cease the constant straining to reheat the stone cold cadaver of empire? Whilst all the while newer economic forces are kicking us further into the long grass like a useless rusty old can. The world long ago lost patience with waiting for this imperious attitude to change.

Even my humble lifestyle, many centuries later, is built on the ground that British slave traders and entrepreneurial marauders first made. The British Empire, like all empires, did not come about reasonably or peacefully, it pillaged and ravaged like any other, We raped other countries of their people, resources, culture, independence and dignity. We used lies, subterfuge, dissimulation, coercion and repressive power to get our way. We placed iron necklaces around people’s necks, we commodified and displaced them. We committed gross atrocities, created the world's first concentration camps, were the great despoilers of cultures and empires far older than our own. All of which we’ve retrospectively applied a sepia tinted veneer to, and a quintessentially English mood of refined respectability and aloof beneficence.

Though we undoubtedly all have had our own struggles, our own indignities, our own sense of wrongs being done to us via common prejudices about status, class or gender. We can always fall back upon national pride in the empire to buttress our self-esteem if we wish to. This presents us with an authenticated certificate of a god given mission. We feel somehow divinely blessed, and no matter how poor we are we can always grasp onto that particular lifebelt. Inhale its salty revivifying perfume, whenever reality knocks us down to size and puts us in our true place in the world.

I have a responsibility as an Englishman, to own my ingrained racism, to accept that it's ingrained nature will make it hard to see clearly. It resides in an unspoken sense of economic entitlement, a national and cultural superiority that arises in part from the propaganda of empire the effects of which still insidiously roll on and on. But this means our present identity as a country is fatally flawed and gives itself an entirely unearned gratuity. Resorting to playing the sentimental rhapsody of empire whenever things get a little challenging to our national self-esteem.

Yet the Empire petered out during the first half of the 20th Century, and ceased effectively to exist before I was born. It nevertheless has left a stain upon our psyche that seeps out in how we talk, think and see ourselves and others. It’s a poisonous legacy, tangible through the all pervading fatalism, our arche cynicism, our ridicule of positive developments, our persistent amnesia over our role in the slave trade, our denial of responsibility or guilt for the dark side of the empire, the defensive defiant nature of our anger, our negative views of the state of our country, all fundamental to the desire for Brexit and the need to be great again. It’s like a psychological plea for help hidden away in the lining of some very plush but closed curtains.

At the moment we hear stronger echoes of our level of indebtedness and responsibility through the #blacklivesmatter protests. This is holding up a mirror to us, yet again. Our refusal as a country to look for too long into that mirror, to fully face the wrongs committed against our fellow humankind in the days of Empire and even through to today, leaves us all abandoned in an alienated state of mind. Always wanting to be left alone as an island, able to physically and psychologically cut ourselves off from Europe, even though we share a history of being fallen empires with most of them. Many have allowed themselves to grow beyond the stains of their empires. Yet here we are still viewing the rest of the world as if it still owes us allegiance, that the Empire can be re-kindled from the embers of what is essentially a mythology founded on lies and half-truths.

There is a pressing need for the history books on the British Empire, to be publicly  re-examined, re-thought and re-written. Our history, like some of our statues, does present and uphold unexamined many immoral things. Toppling those statues or burning those books, without self-reflection and self-examination, would do us no good whatsoever, that would let us off far too lightly. Until we embark on some essential re-examination of our past, we petrify the vision, creativity and imagination of our future, we leave the door closed to a more optimistic forward looking identity as a country.

Britain is a mongrel nation, that prefers to think of itself as thoroughbred. We have been for millenia an island that benefited greatly from successive waves of immigrants, this is what has created who we are. It is then quite ironic that we have this strong tendency toward being small minded, insular and xenophobic. We do not fully understand how we came to be as we are, because our view of our past is deluded and holds us back. There is no longer any room for special pleading, but we try nonetheless - the British Empire was not all bad - look how much we helped them - we gave them democracy and well run institutions - we gave them our god and our reason. All delivered in a patronising form of kindness, as though you’re sending a bolshy child to bed without supper until they show some respect and are grateful.

We were never anyone’s betters. We were just the more powerful adversary, economically, militarily so we could usually get whatever we wanted. What has been portrayed in the Boys Own Annuals as pioneering and heroic, was in actuality a colonial opportunistic grab of power and land, often for purely personal aggrandisement and gain. Such was the life of Clive of India, for instance, but he was far from alone in this sort of activity. This behaviour was often state endorsed, officially approved annexation and appropriation.

I maintain some pride in my country, but the way it continues to behave makes that hard to hold without shame and embarrassment. Our patriotism is of the shallow sort, the one that waves a cheap plastic union jack on a stick, one that is founded on a rotten set of self-beliefs. If it reeks of hypocrisy, racism and corruption this originates in our state institutions, our establishment and its moneyed elites, but it spreads out to infect our wider culture, economy and society. Everyone recognises the smell, the stench of it, it is like a broken drain that no one wants to dig up and mend.

The stains of empire bind us to a view of the past that is actually unworthy of us. We should expect more from ourselves than this tattered old map of Britannia ruling the waves. If we could liberate ourselves from this, we might see ourselves as capable of so much more. If we could genuinely re-envision our past, we would be free to re-vision our future and take it forward in any way we wished.





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DEMOCRATIC DEMENTIA ~ The Early Symptoms

The most common early symptoms of democratic dementia are:

Memory loss
Declining memory, especially short-term memory, is the most common early symptom of democratic dementia. People with ordinary forgetfulness can still remember other facts associated with the thing they have forgotten. For example, they may briefly forget their next-door neighbour's name but they still know the person they are talking to is their next-door neighbour. A person with democratic dementia will not only forget their neighbour's name but also the context.

Difficulty performing familiar tasks
People with democratic dementia often find it hard to complete everyday tasks that are so familiar we usually do not think about how to do them. A person with democratic dementia may not know in what order to put clothes on or the steps for preparing a meal.

Problems with language
Occasionally everyone has trouble finding the right word but a person with democratic dementia often forgets simple words or substitutes unusual words, making speech or writing hard to understand.

Disorientation to time and place
We sometimes forget the day of the week or where we are going but people with democratic dementia can become lost in familiar places such as the road they live in, forget where they are or how they got there, and not know how to get back home. A person with democratic dementia may also confuse night and day.

Poor or decreased judgement
People with democratic dementia may dress inappropriately, wearing several layers of clothes on a warm day or very few on a cold day.

Problems with keeping track of things
A person with democratic dementia may find it difficult to follow a conversation or keep up with paying their bills.

Misplacing things
Anyone can temporarily misplace his or her wallet or keys. A person with democratic dementia may put things in unusual places such as an iron in the fridge or a wristwatch in the sugar bowl.

Changes in mood or behaviour
Everyone can become sad or moody from time to time. A person with democratic dementia may become unusually emotional and experience rapid mood swings for no apparent reason. Alternatively a person with democratic dementia may show less emotion than was usual previously.

Changes in personality
A person with democratic dementia may seem different from his or her usual self in ways that are difficult to pinpoint. A person may become suspicious, irritable, depressed, apathetic or anxious and agitated especially in situations where memory problems are causing difficulties.

Loss of initiative
At times everyone can become tired of housework, business activities, or social obligations. However a person with democratic dementia may become very passive, sitting in front of the television for hours, sleeping more than usual, or appear to lose interest in hobbies.


If you are experiencing any of these symptoms or are concerned about a friend or relative, visit your doctor and discuss your concerns.

* Source https://www.alz.co.uk/info/early-symptoms  Alzheimer's Disease International ~ with one minor editorial  adjustment.

ARTICLE ~ When Democracy Has Cut Its Own Throat

I keep waiting for the residual anger to subside, but over two years later, it hasn't. The moment my thoughts go anywhere near the B word I step potentially onto an escalator towards a self enfeebling frustration. Every week appears to provide more fuel to feed this fire. I'm still hopeful for equanimity on the subject to come, or at the very least apathy. But so far its no show on both counts. The  worrying thing is that I fear I'm far from alone in this.

Merely to mention the B word in polite conversation these days makes everyone go stiff and ready to be on the defensive. You never know the lie of the land ahead, there might be 'one of them' someone who holds a different opinion to you, potentially hostile territory anywhere.There seems to be an elephant under the carpet in every room. Its as if The B word is a trigger word releasing pre-programmed responses, turning the minds of previously reasonable people into folk who only speak in slogans, loudly volatile and beligerent.

I've never voted Tory, voted Labpur only twice, Green once, mostly it was LibDem until their foolish Faustian pact with the Tory's. I voted tactically last time, simply to prevent a Tory from getting in. In a fair and fully functioning modern democracy you shouldn't have to do that. I've got used to wasting my vote on a party with no chance of getting represented or under represented in Parliament due to the gerrymandered nature of the majority vote system. I vote, but as the options increasingly narrow, I do so with ever diminishing enthusiasm and increasing frustration. The political response to the Dumb Ref result of ' any majority will do', silenced my voice, creating another democratic deficit withdrawl from my goodwill account.

Dumb Refs are generally bad democracy masquerading as good. Used by governments often split within their own party on an issue, that wants to shift that division, responsibility and any potential blame, external to themselves. To bury it in the 'democracy' of public opinion. Cross your fingers and hope that with effective brainwashing by the media the people will do what you want them to. Ah, the fool Cameron, where are you now? That it made a whole swathe of society feel like their opinion suddenly mattered and be effective for the first time, tells you how broken Parliamentary Democracy has become. Its ironic that they would give Parliament the finger whilst at the same time returning it full sovereignty.

We have also been gifted those divisive terms Remainer's and Leaver's too. Fracturing cohesion, unity, tolerance, understanding, reasonableness and compassion for others and other people's opinions~ giving a voice and platform to the Riff Raff the darker shadowy beasts in society. There's been a lot of mock hand wringing about the Leaver's being left behind and democratic deficits. I can tell you from my point of view, you don't have to be an Leaver to feel left out of the conversation. its happening all the time.

This has been accompanied and fed by the rise and rise of 'the untruth.' People sporting noses as big as Pinocchio's are unquestioningly believed, as they wave national myths and prejudices around like Febreeze. Allowing the Riff Raff to adopt the Dumb Ref as a patriotic cause.

The result was closely hung. The result of the binary Yes/No vote gave politicians democratic legitimacy to do whatever they wanted to do in the first place, and claim they are carrying out the B result. Hoping there will be a dividend for the fortunes of their own party. Seeing that the country is so divided, you could've tried to find where a unifying consensus might lie on the B word, or you could say 'the winner takes it all' and give a V sign to everyone else, whilst elbowing your way towards the TV cameras, like Boris does. All the talk is of 'taking back control' but you have to ask for the benefit of whom. Have the electorate unwittingly become a tool in someone else's agenda? Shadowy, but wealthy individuals who's intentions are likely to be less democratically accountable than the European Commission's

So a small majority is repackaged as 'the will of the people'. The country fracturing further into countless pseudo 'religious' sects of believers over what the B word actually means. Each of them holding aloft 'the truth' - its all so simple, why is it taking so long? Because it is neither simple nor speedy to do. I would have resigned myself to B had I not felt that the bouncers on its door were aggresively preventing me from entering the debate.

Say you are a company with shareholders, and you had a new financial strategy for the company but needed to get the shareholders backing before launching it. Say the result was 52% for the proposal, though a majority, you might consider it an insufficient endorsement to go ahead with your strategy, and go back to the drawing board.  With shareholders you are looking for a decisive incontrovertible thumping majority, not any old majority will do. It has to be a majority that will unify and pacify dissenters, not fuel them. The Dumb Ref result wasn't thumping or conclusive and hence failed in its primary objective to resolve the issue for a generation.

Ordinary people, media, government and Parliament mindlessly babble slogans like 'B means B', 'Leave means Leave.' But its all a bit like the Emperor's New Cloths with everyone behaving as if they knew exactly what 'the will of the people' was, and what the B word really meant, whilst leaving nearly half of the country completely out of the conversation. Untruth becomes Truth, further corroding peoples trust and faith in democracy, the media and civil institutions. The Government's way of responding to the Dumb Ref and how its handled the negotiations with the EU, has provided us with a classic example of what Really Bad Democracy looks like. The words arrogant, entitled and self-deluded describing some of its least worst characteristics.

Carrying out the consequences of the B word was always going to be a bit like a heart transplant operation, a good chance of survival if you are patient, clear what you want, plan, prepare well and stay focused. But if you are impatient, unprepared, unclear what you want and lose your focus all the time, so when it all goes tits up you just rip out the old heart and thrust in the new. Something is going to die.

Our Parliamentary representatives are trying to find their way through a maze that has no map. We should not be at all surprised, nor blame them alone for what is really of our collective making. They very accurately reflect us. We are all floundering in a chaotic sea, but not personally wanting to own that chaos. Not one of us feels willing to reach a consensus about a way forward for the country, one that everyone, Remain or Leave, can get behind. We all want our own way to prevail, and democracy simply cannot function in an inflexible scenario. Trenchant divisions repeatedly slit the throat of compromise.

Out of the 17th Century Civil War came the creation of Parliamentary Democracy, beginning when Parliament executed its own King. Let's hope that something regenerative happens to our sense of decency and democracy post B.  But at present we are still in an idiotic Civil War between Remainer's and Leaver's. After B happens, it won't be over, because unrealistic promises have been made and there will be a day of reckoning for them all at some point. This could get nasty.

With democratic liberal society reputationally in such a bad state, people may be tempted to grasp for simpler more authoritarian certainties. If so, if you are not white, from another country, or simply different from the perceived norm, beware. Whilst deeply distrustful of Union Jack waving populist patriotism, I do care about the future of the country I was born in. I'm fearful for where all this going to lead, I really hope to be proved categorically wrong, but its looking like where we are heading is not going to be a good place, not a good place at all. 

The consequences of the B word will be a Revolution of sorts. Revolutions tend to have just one aim, to topple a dictator, remove a despotic King, to change a countries political or religious orientation, or to liberate an oppressed people. But once that aim is achieved nine times out of ten no one has a fully worked out a plan for what to do next. In that vacuum arises anarchic situations around which the Riff Raff circle. Their bull dogs sniff the air and get a sense for 'when Democracy has cut its own throat' so they can come out to feast on its carcass.