Make it worth defending

One of my favourite quotes comes from someone about whom I otherwise know exactly nothing. When asked if Fermilab contributed to the defence of the United States, the founding director R. R. Wilson allegedly said :

No sir, I don’t believe so... Nothing at all. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country, except to make it worth defending.

Given that a lot of the following rant is about lies, you might want to read both of those links, though the accuracy of that particular quote is not relevant. It's the principle that's important.

First we might briefly consider this rather nice piece from the Atlantic, which in brief summary says that Trump supporters believe the election was stolen because of vague feelings and intuitions that it should have been. They've been primed over many years to believe Trump and disbelieve anyone else. And like I’ve been saying for a while, the point of misinformation isn’t (usually) to convince but to confuse. Once you stop trusting facts, you fall back on gut instinct and emotion. While you can often and all too easily manipulate statistics toward whatever end you see fit, it is altogether harder to do this when it comes to the final binary choice : who got more votes ? At this level data cannot be bent or broken. Facts are facts. 

Feelings, however, are altogether more malleable. Sowing distrust ahead of time means that when you reach that final choice, the data no longer matters. Feelings are all that’s left : the election must have been stolen - so the unconscious thoughts go - because the alternative does not fit my intuition.

It's a nice article, but I do have one major critique :

These voters aren’t bad or unintelligent people.

Yes they are. They are a bunch of bigoted racist, filter-bubble-brained, idiotic, useless twats. I could go on, but I now turn my attention to my main target : the Tories.

Boris Johnson is a pathological liar. We already know this, but he insists on reminding us so often that one sometimes feels he's deliberately trying to one's nose in it. Much like Trump proclaiming he could shoot someone, Johnson's verbal equivalent of writing an apology in Comic Sans is damn close to saying it doesn't matter if he broke the law or not, he can do what he wants.

That Johnson attended parties is itself shameful. There's no way around this. The vast majority of people stuck rigidly to the rules despite having to make enormous sacrifices to do so. For some, staying inside and watching Netflix is hardly a burden, but for plenty of others, missing essential contact with loved ones is asking the Earth. If you wanted to go to the pub then it sucks to be you, but if you had to attend a funeral, or wanted to see your ill or elderly relatives, then this is altogether different. 

Tory claims that nurses and teachers were all indulging in similar parties is wrong every which way you look at it. It's wrong because it's factually untrue. It's wrong also because one illegal act doesn't justify someone's else's (I mean, good grief, do these people not have mothers ?!? This is parenting 101 !). It's just a plainly horrible thing to say : it doesn't matter that the Prime Minister broke the law because everybody else did too ? They bloody well didn't, because those laws were in place for a very good reason, you muppet. Not everyone's thought processes are such a bunch of bullshit, least of all nurses and teachers.

Then we have Johnson's claim that it never occurred to him he might be breaking the law. This is a farcically stupid thing to say, because his instructions were, for once, as clear as day. Everybody understood them. So for him to say that he and his cronies alone did not means that either he is at best monumentally incompetent or, worse, uncaring of the rules and their necessity. Either he's incredibly stupid or he's a liar. And these are not mutually exclusive conditions by any means - he could well be both. Stupid, malevolent or both, he clearly shouldn't be in charge anything at all.

In the end, though, the parties themselves are a secondary concern. Boris may have taken the definition of "political party" rather too literally, but there's no real chance that the events actually did contribute much to the spread of the coronavirus. What's actually dangerous is the lying. I need not summarise this because Boris lied at every turn. He lied when he said no rules were broken, he lied when he said he didn't know about the events, he lied when he said he didn't know he was at a party, he lies practically every time he turns up the Commons to fail to answer questions. He repeatedly refuses to correct the record on the most minor of issues. And in that classic behaviour of a liar, he continuously changes his story. It's just not credible to suggest that even Boris Johnson is so hapless that he's doing anything other than lying through his teeth. Being a buffoon doesn't automatically mean someone is nice.

Then we have the absurd and tiresomely predictable claims that we can't change leader during a war. Again, this is wrong every way you look at it. For starters, we're not at war, idiot ! One country we don't like is fighting another country which we do like. The only sense in which we're fighting is vicariously, by proxy. If you let this criteria prevent us from changing leader then we'll probably never be able to change leader again. Secondly, for God's sake, we changed Prime Minister during World War II. It's absurd to suggest that we can change leader during an actual, direct war but not during a remote, proxy conflict !

But this too is by-the-by. It's the lies that matter. Lies are how it all starts. Frank Herbert said that it's truth that comes closest to being the basis for all morality, and I think he was right. True, philosophically, establishing "truth" is hard, but we don't need to excogitate on the nature of reality in day-to-day politics. We all know the domain of sensory perception and evidence we're considering. We implicitly understand the applicant conditions of what's being asked, that by "Boris Johnson" we mean a collection of what we call atoms arranged in the repulsive shape of a blonde twerp, and by "party" we understand that a multitude of similar such badly-arranged atoms gathered for an explicitly social event. It doesn't matter that rigorously pinning down the precise definitions of even such things as "chairs" is remarkably difficult, because we know, at a deep, inexpressible, gut level, what it is we have to consider. We know what's relevant, even if a definition of "know" sometimes eludes us.

No, philosophy won't save Boris here. The only credible interpretation of the facts is that Boris Johnson wilfully and repeatedly misled Parliament because he wants to stay in power. Any other viewpoint is ridiculous.

It's been suggested that this doesn't matter because in other countries politicians are held to much lower standards. Well, fuck that. I say the fact that all these lies are over trivialities like cake are not excusable, but are exactly why Boris needs to be removed from office. How could you ever trust a man who goes to enormous lengths to evade and deceive over such petty details as to whether he had a slice of bloody cake or not ? How could you ever trust such a man to make the really big decisions ? No, war in Ukraine is not a justification for keeping such a twat in charge - it's the very opposite, a clear indication of an urgent need to kick him out. For all that Britain has done well with military support, it's been pretty pathetic on the humanitarian front, something a new leader could remedy but Boris and his racist foreign secretary surely won't.

Lies matter for two reasons. First, when you stop respecting the truth, you end up with Trumps. You end up with vile creatures like Priti Patel... here I must digress. There's no alternative to sending asylum seeks to Rwanda ? Are you fucking mad ?* You're saying that Rwanda has better facilities than us and there's nothing we can do about it ? What kind of idiot do you think I am ? I'll tell you an alternative : anything. Literally anything**. For God's sake, they're people crossing in small boats who are drowning out there. What the hell kind of threat do you think they pose ? What the hell are you so afraid of ? If it was up to me, I would simply let them all in. They're just people.

* I'm glad to see this idea being shot down in flames from many quarters, but I feel stronger language needs to be used. "Racist cunt" would be about right, but I'd be prepared to settle for "heartless bitch".
**Except possibly sending them to Russia. But sssh, don't give the evil witch ideas.

And to return to my point : ultimately, lies lead you to monsters like Putin.

Now I'm not saying Boris is comparable, though Patel might be. But once you start setting precedents like this you risk a very slippery slope. If breaking the law isn't a good reason to depose a Prime Minister, then just what is, exactly ? If the Prime Minister openly lying is acceptable, in what sense do we have a meaningful democracy ? None at all, it seems to me. None. He can just make up whatever excuse he likes about whatever he wants to do and the whole process of holding officials to account goes out the window. 

So yeah, today's Boris might hardly be someone who deliberately slaughters innocents (needless pandemic causalities aside, which are not the same), but this idea of accepting a proven liar in charge opens the door to things which are so very much worse tomorrow. Presuming that this won't happen is folly of the highest order. Without red lines for our leaders, we are setting them above the law. It is very hard to see how any democracy can survive such an eventuality. I'm not saying the country will instantly burst into flames - that's daft - but that road is an awful lot shorter than we might like to think. Our political system is too precious to take it for granted.

No, the cake doesn't matter. The parties aren't that important. The lies are what matters. To have a political system in which honesty is valued do much that even trivial lies are not excused is very much like Fermilab : it doesn't directly help us with defence, but by God it makes us worth defending. And to add something that R. R. Wilson probably wouldn't, but needs to be said : fuck you, Boris, you fascistic lying clown-faced imbecile. Go throw yourself down a well and rid us of your stupidity. Enough.