Public Enemy Number One

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We are living in treacherous times: climate change, the breakdown of economic 'systems' [category error there, methinks], the continued despoiling of our planet and peoples at the hands of out-of-control corporates and billionaires, exercising their power not just in the service of profit, but in influencing geopolitics and human development in the most sinister ways imaginable through the social re-engineering of communication and human discourse via disinformation spread at breakneck speed on social media. I refer mainly to the obscene events that followed the Southport killings the other day. That the outbreak of violence and hatred that ensued was uncalled for, callous and cruel to the residents of the community affected by the tragedy goes without saying. That it issued forth from unfounded rumour spread by a small number of far-right disrupters and influencers is not entirely surprising, given the track record of these destructive fuckwits.

The principal actors? Andrew Tate, Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage MP. Within minutes of the first two spewing their foul, racist bile into the mix, Farage piled in with a video asking the apparently 'innocuous' question: 'is there something we're not being told, here?' [I paraphrase]. A sitting MP, not only engaging with some of the most odious people on the planet and subscribing to their paranoiac fantasies, but deliberately fanning the flames of the actions that ensued, is the most disturbing aspect of this whole sorry affair. But this la-la land shit doesn't stop with the obvious stuff like this: throwing bricks, bottles and fire-starting are just the most visible manifestations of the far-right's pernicious creep into our society.  The most insidious is the influence exerted through the nudge effect of rumour and insinuation that is the staple of social media such as Twitter/X, which impacts on discourse via algorithmically-filtered streams of ill-informed and untested opinion posing as fact and even 'journalism':

I picked up a feed this morning about the Labour government's 'intended' resurrection of the poll tax. Based on what, exactly? A Chinese whisper started by a poorly-written piece - current - on BirminghamLive, which then goes on to quote the then Leader of the Opposition[!], interviewed on LBC over a fortnight before the General Election, saying '"What I'm not going to do is sit here two and a bit weeks before the election and write the budgets for the next five years."' in answer to the question of whether a potential future Labour government would increase Council Tax. All of a sudden, a vague suggestion of a possible reworking of the tax - House Value x 0.5% - becomes  a potential viral kickback at a government mere weeks into its tenure. Is there something we're not being told here? God the rumour mill is a piece of shit. And Council Tax has long needed reform anyway...

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