An Occasional Guide to Irish Politics: The Look-At-Me Political Activist.

You see him blocking people going to work, and immediately wonder is he actually being paid by the powerful interest he’s supposedly opposing. You ask that because he is primarily a pain in the arse, irritating people far more than convincing them. Is that his plan? Perhaps, although more often the plan actually actually involves getting into the knickers of some other young activist, and so has committed to this Cause Du Jour. Repeal for the Ride. Forests for Fanny. Gaza for …. you get the idea.             Even if it’s not for his own sexual gratification, his actions are not as much a political action as a piece of performative art to show her or the other activists how creative they are. The actual achieving of the goal, through either converting the public to one’s cause or forcing government to change policy direction to reduce inconvenience seems to feature far less as an end objective.

After all, pouring milk all over the floor in a supermarket and leaving some poor young lad who works in Tesco going home on the bus stinking of milk is far more dramatic that having ten people go in, keep filling trollies with products then abandoning the trollies in the queue. Do three trollies each and you’ve blocked up the place and forced an irate manager to reassign his limited staff numbers to clear the blockage.

Keep doing that and the manager has to hire give more paid hours to his most underpaid staff to keep the supermarket branch from losing frustrated customers. There’s a protest that actually hits the supermarket in the pocket, but it’s just not as cool as pouring milk on Tik Tok.

7 things every real liberal should know.

1. You, and everybody else, has a right to offend and be offended. Too much freedom of speech always trumps too little.

2. Everybody has the right to keep their money as much as you have the right to keep yours.

3. Before demanding someone have more power over someone else, imagine giving that power to your worst enemy, and see if you’re comfortable with that.

4. The validity of an argument is not increased by how strongly you feel about it.

5. It is possible to disagree with someone’s politics but like them personally.

6. Everybody minding their own business is the solution to far more problems than you think.

7. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a compassionate welfare system. There is something wrong with thinking that basic maths has nothing to do with it. Every euro spent has to be taken or borrowed off someone else.

 

A Thumbnail Guide to Election 2020: The Reckless Voter.

dynamiteYes, of course he’s entitled to his opinion, and yes, to his vote. But he’s not entitled to our respect. But let’s be clear who he actually is: he’s not The Voter Who Voted For Someone You Disagree With. That’s healthy, that’s democracy.

No, this guy is worse. This is the guy who listens to Trump, and knows what he’s saying doesn’t make sense, but it makes him feel good and so he votes for him anyway. Who hears a presidential candidate call on supporters to beat up opponents and thinks “Well, he didn’t tell them to beat up me, so it’s OK.”

Or she, on seeing Bernie getting defeated by Hillary, vows not to vote in a tantrum to “teach Hillary a lesson”. Because Trump will defend the rights that Bernie wasn’t able to?

Or votes to sabotage an EU-Ukraine trade deal not because they care about Ukraine one way or the other but because they just want to lash out.

These are the people who let the darkness in. The political plate spinners who look at all the broken crockery around them and always have someone else to blame. The people democratic theory fails, because it assumes that people will always vote in their own best interest.

They who voted for HIM because he was really tough on the Communists, and when Jewish friends asked them have they not heard what he says about Jews they go: “Meh: he’ll get rid of the Commies. Then we’ll worry about it.”

These are the people who go back to the firework after the fuse goes out, because it “hardly ever goes off”.

An Occasional Guide to Modern Politics: The Young Sellout.

We must work WITHIN the alien's human eating system to achieve change!

We must work WITHIN the alien’s human eating system to achieve change!

His father had been a socialist utopian in his youth, marching in his long hair and droopy moustache For a Marxist Paradise. He grew out of it, of course, and now keeps an eye on his pension portfolio, but there you have it. What’s the old saying? If you’re not on the left when you’re young, you have no heart, but if you’re not on the right when you’re old, you have no brain?

Our hero is worse. He has no soul. From the moment he joined the party’s youth section, he was a trimmer with a wet finger in the air constantly turning political direction. He wants to be in politics, but has almost no interest in politics. Ask him what his political values are, and he comes out with phrases that sound like they were tested by a focus group in 1998. He talks about how he is “proud” to be a member of a party, like a 1980s Japanese salary-man singing the Toshiba company song.

Where’s the rebelliousness of youth? Where’s sticking it to The Man? He doesn’t do that. He works with The Man, confidant that The Man will recognise his pragmatic loyalty to the party and reward him with a nomination in the forthcoming local authority elections. Put him on the telly and he wears his confirmation suit and tries to parrot what the party grown ups say. There’s nothing, NOTHING more mortifying than watching a 15 year old come out with stuff like “what young people want is fiscal rectitude and a cut in Capital Gains Tax.”

Remember that old TV series “V”, about the giant lizard mouse eating aliens disguised as humans, who came claiming friendship, and then set up a Nazi youth style organisation? He would have signed up. “We must work with our Alien masters, and as minister of state for Human Consumption I look forward to…”

And most of all, he’ll read this blog posting and think I’m writing about him.

An Occasional Guide to Modern Politics: The Kremlin Patsy.

PutinHe’s a new type on the block, and governed very much by the credo of “My enemy’s enemy is my friend”, and the Kremlin loves him.

Not because he’ll sing the praises of the Putin regime, because that would be just too weird, even for them. Instead, he’s big into drawing parallels between the Russians and the West. The Russians have a leader who is willing to stand up to the West, and the West doesn’t like it, that sort of thing. Putin is far more popular with his own people than Obama is, he’ll casually announce, which is certainly more achievable if you can actually ban your opponents from TV or purely coincidentally live in a country with a curiously high casualty rate amongst journalists critical of the state.

He’ll be quick to dismiss NATO as being as bad as Al Qaeda, or that there’s no difference between Russian and Western democracy. Well, that goes without saying. After all, we’ve all had to stay up late on election night in Russia to see who has won. I wonder what party will win the next, say, three Russian presidential elections?

And that’s just the lefty ones. Then there’s the ones on the right, who twenty five years ago would have been shouting at pro-Russians to “go home to Moscow!” Now, Russia is a country that isn’t afraid to be patriotic and “traditional” (i.e. beating up the odd poofter), and so what if they refuse to mollycoddle blacks or Muslims or Jews like we do in the West. At least he’s listening to his people, they’ll declare, using pretty much the same argument the old segregationists of the 1950s used to use.

And of course don’t get him started on the EU, or the EUSSR as he blurts out with a smile at his cleverness. Every time Putin has a go at the EU our friend feels a stirring in his nether regions. Of course, if the EU announced it wanted to show the same “strong leadership” over Europe that Putin has over Russia he’d be the first to the barricades banging on about democracy.

They’re easy enough to spot. Just watch them retweeting stuff from Russia Today. Which they say is Russia’s version of the BBC. Because, as we know, no British government has ever been criticised by the BBC, or indeed tried to stop the BBC doing things. Ever.

Polonium? Never heard of it.

Death on the Fringes.

silvioBerlusconi. Putin. Erdogan. Farage. Le Pen. Wilders. What do all these names have in common? All have built a cult of personality on a platform of authoritarian nationalist populism. But another factor is that each one of them has built a movement which will suffer a serious, possibly even fatal blow, if one of the above were to die suddenly.

It’s a curious feature of the hard right, the centralising of power around a key figure. As Franco, Mussolini and others proved, pull the keystone figure away and the whole structure could collapse in a way that democratic centrist parties just don’t.

If Farage, Berlusconi or Putin in particular suddenly passed away in the night there’d be a actual chaos in their organisations, a genuine vacuum and lack of clear succession that could destroy the whole enterprise in a vicious struggle for power.

Just a thought.

An Occasional Guide to Irish Politics: The Secret Rational Voter.

She doesn’t like paying higher taxes any more than anyone else, or having her public services cut. But she’s rational, and calm, and irritated by the emotional hysteria that seems to pass for debate in modern politics. She hates the masochistic delight that some wallow in over The Banks, like the Vikings and the Brits and the potatoes before them, something out of our control to point a finger at and wail and scream at and blame for our shortcomings.

She knows that every extra euro somebody wants spent on Special Needs Assistants or A&E has to come from somebody else’s pocket, and that’s not right wing or Thatcherite, that’s just sums. As it happens, she is quite left wing on social spending, and that’s why she quietly fills in her standing order to various charities, but that costs money too. But she makes that sacrifice because she knows that things cost money and how strongly you feel about something doesn’t change the basic maths.

That’s why, if she could, she’d vote for the Troika. For calm rational technocrats who look at spreadsheets and tell you what you can afford and can’t. Sure, if you want to increase education spending by X, then you have to increase taxes by Y.

She can’t watch politicians anymore, with their time-eating pre-packaged inoffensive “hard working families” and “investment” and “resources” and basic refusal to tell voters that no, you can’t have your cake and eat someone else’s cake too. Don’t get her started on the angry hateful faces “in the audience”, the witchcraft denouncers of the modern age, wrapping their consumer fuelled frustrations with their own lives into a tight ball of bile and directing it at the cowering, stuttering spineless half-men of Irish politics who just sit and take it like scolded dogs. She watches the cyclical nature of Irish politics getting shorter, with opposition parties making promises that have to be broken sooner and sooner in office.

She thinks she’s alone in her anger, and she’s not. The problem is that there’s a groupthink, where 30% of big-mouths get to tell the rest of us that this is a terrible country (it isn’t) and nothing works (it does)and the health service is Third World (no, it isn’t) and all politicians are corrupt (no, they’re not) and we go along with their image of the country. She knows this is a country with problems but also a country with great strengths.

Is it so unreasonable for her to look for a candidate that doesn’t dress up what they want to do, that gives a cold credible analysis of what they will do in office? Who doesn’t build a campaign on subliminal promises that are so nebulous that they’ll never be met because we can’t measure them. Is it really that unreasonable to look for that?

An Occasional Guide to Modern Politics: The Illiberal Liberal

Tis' Pity She's A Tory!

Tis’ Pity She’s A Tory!

In another time, he would have made a wonderful member of the Spanish Inquisition, or a Witchfinder General. It’s ironic given his loathing of Judeo-Christian beliefs, but he does share the love of the Inquisition for purity. Like his counterparts in the US Tea Party, purity is all. In his head is a clean black and white (that’s racist!) checklist that all are subjected to, and all either pass totally or are racists or bigots or fascists or homophobes or more likely indeed all at the same time.

Not for him the happy-go-lucky live-and-let-live of old fashioned liberals. He’s not just against bigotry or sexism, he’s against what HE decides is bigotry or sexism. That’s the difference. He will, like the Catholic Hierarchy of old, tell YOU what is acceptable to think and believe and feel.

Nor for him the liberal demand for equal voices debating the issues. Debate is, in his book, a risk. A risk that the simple folk, of whom he claims a desire to speak for, might not comprehend what is the right conclusion to come to. Like a loyal member of any number of authoritarian parties, he’s perfectly comfortable with the use of illiberal methods against the impure. He’s no problem with aggressively denigrating people’s religious beliefs, but how dare anyone write a book debating the welfare state! Heresy! It shouldn’t be allowed!

Yet, like vampires, he has his weaknesses, but the devil is in the detail. Watch his brain go into a malfunctioning feedback loop if he encounters a burka wearing Muslim woman campaigning against abortion, whereas he is quite happy getting stuck into a pro-Israeli gay rights campaigner. It’s all down to the Big Hate: hatred of X will always trump a desire for Y. And the US are always the baddies. Always. If Martians launched an invasion of Earth, he’d blame the Americans for “provoking them”. If Vladimir Putin suddenly u-turned on gay rights, this guy would be hailing him as a Man for the Age.

Real liberals struggle to tell him apart from almost the worse kind of authoritarian. He won’t execute you, but he will jail you for crimes against Gaia or crimes that your great great great grandfather probably committed against the native people of the Americas, or for that filthy Original Sin, being born a straight white man. But the prison tofu will be great.