Diversity is good, actually

I'll be pleased if Nigel Farage gets into parliament

Random pic. Don’t overthink it.

First - thank you to everyone who makes this thing feel worth doing. And especially to

Nate Silver

for the recommendation that seems to have pushed Rarely Certain past this milestone. He’s recommended back. Go there and see why.

Thank you, meaningful audience. Now that’s enough gratuitous self-promotion.

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Elections are just so in right now, so here’s more on the two I can’t escape (as a Brit living in France)

Bien pensants are fussing over polls predicting that Nigel Farage will finally make it into parliament as the MP for Clacton.

There's a quality of 'moral' thought that seems ineffably stupid to me, when it comes to a desire to suppress things like the 'populist right'.

Banning videos from YouTube, or speakers from platforms, reminds me somewhat of an old joke from the 70s about how people would squint at certain Dr Who scenes from behind the sofa. If you can avoid seeing the Daleks properly they can't get you.

Although the Daleks aren't really out there, the ideas that make Farage popular among a significant set of the population really are. Whether or not they are 'legitimised' by the democratic act of installing him in the legislature, those ideas remain at large.

I don't actively desire to see Nigel Farage in Westminster, because I'm not a fan. But many are and I do want to see his supporters better represented. Some of this is pragmatic, rather than driven by a sense of obvious fairness. Once people who always liked him see that 'the establishment' failed to stop him it might restore a bit of trust.

Also, just as I think that Farage being in parliament is a good thing, I also think that people who passionately advocate for 100+ gender identities receiving legal status should be there too.

I want parliament to be full of MPs who represent people other than me, because somehow I've realised late in life that I'm not the centre of the universe and that opinions other than mine are available.

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In a way it feels as if politics is increasingly childish, at both ends of the traditionally conceived left-right spectrum.

The desire to see that commonly held views are not represented in the national legislature is self-evidently ridiculous.

Last year I watched a young woman in Marseille calmly ripping down a series of posters for Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National party. I wondered about her thought process. Then, more recently, I was walking with a friend who - with equal alacrity - ripped down a similar poster. I just laughed, hoped a nearby anti-vax neighbour didn’t notice and we didn't discuss why he’d done so. It was just obvious to him that the poster shouldn’t be seen.

Like many people I know (and even more I don't know) he is worried about the 'extrême droite' winning big in the legislative elections that President Macron unexpectedly called when his own party did badly in the European elections.

But if we were more rational about these things we would see that ripping down posters is an 'anti-democratic' act. It's on the same spectrum as book-burning, which we're all supposed to abhor in a free society.

I don't want to see Rassemblement National in control of the legislature here, either. But since so many people align with its values it's just self-evidently bad for those values not to be represented in government.

It seems so obvious that I'm out of juice for forming a more sophisticated argument about it.

The only argument in favour of ripping down posters is circular; our views are good and theirs are dangerous, so we must suppress their views. Why? Because our views are good and theirs are dangerous.

So, on the question of what's right and what's wrong, there is evidently a definite authority. Which is whatever your side believes.

Authoritarianism now seems to be politically agnostic, even though it's only the more radically conservative brand that continues to be labelled as such, judging by Wikipedia's definition.

In fact, it seems inconsistent to me that authoritarianism hasn't been more widely recognised as politically agnostic.

There's an interesting contrast between Wikipedia's entries on the 'far' right and 'far' left.

Here's the opener for the 'far right'.

Far-right politics, or right-wing extremism, is a spectrum of political thought that tends to be radically conservative, ultra-nationalist, and authoritarian, often also including nativist tendencies.

And here's the first sentence for the 'far left'.

Far-left politics, also known as the extreme left, are politics further to the left on the left–right political spectrum than the standard political left.

Those are different in an obvious way.

One has a list of scary things in the first sentence and the other doesn't.

We are now clear on which one of these we need to worry about.

So, back to Farage. Doubtless one of the worries that a certain caste (professional, educated, middlebrow, managerial types) will have now is that seeing him in parliament will 'embolden' supporters to come out from wherever they've been mostly hiding and start saying things about how they agree with him.

'Embolden' is a word I think of as signalling, rather than descriptive or informational.

I first started noticing this when Brexit and Trump happened and people on social media started talking about how these things had 'emboldened' a subset of people to start being openly racist, misogynistic or 'phobic' about various identity classes.

Why not 'encouraged' or 'motivated'?

Because everyone knows that only mostly good things encourage or motivate people, so a different word is needed for bad things; which is why 'emboldened' is a good choice, sounding as it does a bit sinister.

So it's no surprise to discover that the BBC's Disinformation & Social Media correspondent recently advised that ordinary people who tweet in support of Britain's right-populist Reform UK party can 'embolden' other people to voice support for Britain's right-populist Reform UK party.

David McGrogan beat me to this one, so you can read about it on his page too.

Springtime for Tyrants

Although few normal people will be interested in Marianna Spring's discovery that a conservative welder called Matt, in north west England, isn't a 'Russian bot', there is something sinister about the kind of atmosphere that this nonsense creates.

The intent is always to avoid having to engage with the 'wrong' people's ideas by simply delegitimising the people themselves. And Spring makes no bones about her disapproval of the Matts of Britain tweeting approvingly about Reform UK. She says - apparently without irony

"... comments that boost the perceived support for a political party - whether they come from UK voters or inauthentic accounts - can embolden more real people to join in." (Source: Bot or not: Are fake accounts swaying voters towards Reform UK?)"

This is such a stupid observation that it can really only mean one thing; that Spring wants everyone to know that she doesn't approve of ordinary people posting in an approving way about Reform UK.

Like pulling down posters, it's all about preferring that the other side weren't seen or heard at all, rather than defeating their arguments.

Having been a minor player in the 'disinformation space' at one time, I have inside knowledge of the fears that drive this idiocy.

It's a sense that I too once shared that some of us are simply more valid as opinion-havers than those other people. A form of intellectual or political narcissism.

So we construct stories about the vulnerability of lesser people to nefarious 'influence'-peddling. Just because they tend to be less formally educated and think differently than we do.

The funniest personal example I have of this came when I learned the true identity of a 'Russian troll' that made national headlines. He was just a young guy on the Isle of Wight.

So much of our supposed political discussion seems now to focus as much on whether certain perspectives should be aired at all.

Whereas I'd prefer to see political chatter centred more on which ideas would create which situations and whether they are desirable to the majority or not.

Special deal reminder

I’ve had to cancel a lot of subscriptions this year, having run into financially straitened times. So I know how much this reading of stuff can mount up.

Lots of us are feeling the pinch and I’d like to introduce a monthly subscription rate at less than $5 or €5 - but Substack won’t allow it.

Buymeacoffee has recently proved better on here than asking for subscription upgrades to paid and I’ve been happy with the generosity of readers who don’t want to commit to a rolling subscription.

My policy is always to return the favour of a coffee with a pro rata subscription. To be fair, this doesn’t get you very much because I tend not to paywall articles very often. But it does open up commenting, which is sometimes nice. I’m lucky in this respect, because comments are always thoughtful and relevant around here.

So this is a reminder that if you do buy me a coffee, you also get something back; a month of full subscriber privileges for each coffee (or beer, or archive document for my WW2 squadron project).

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