Spanish life is not always likeable but it is
compellingly loveable.
-
Christopher
Howse: A
Pilgrim in Spain.
Spain
- Today's challenges for the Catalan independistas.
- Some good news for we hard-done-by drivers.
- The Local's advice for would-be skiers in Spain.
The EU
- Don Quijones is not, it seems, the only harsh critic of the ECB. Click here for an article which contains the claims that: 1. The ECB is the most unaccountable and independent central bank in history, whose senior staff are international diplomats that cannot be arrested and whose documents cannot be accessed and audited by any court of audit or public prosecutor in the world – it is above the law. 2. It has consciously shrouded its entire operations and presentation to the public in misinformation; 3. The ECB has worked hard to exacerbate the crises and recessions, notably in Greece and Spain. And 4: The ECB is currently creating a significant property bubble in Germany. But what would you expect from idealogue politicians dedicated to The Project, regardless of public opinion?
- On that . . . More here on the little domestic problems Brussels is having with Eastern members.
- Which reminds me . . December in that fine city was the least sunny in 80 years. A mere 5 hours. If I were a US evangelist, I'd surely see that as a sign from God. Even darker times ahead.
The USA
- As I was hinting at yesterday . . .
- From a female columnist, Melanie Philips: The hypocrisy is epic. Many actors expressing such outrage use sexual chemistry to attract the predatory male movie executives they then profess to despise. They habitually wear outfits that leave little to the imagination, split upwards or downwards or utterly transparent. What’s more, many of the movies and TV series in which they appear, some of them having forgotten to put on any clothes at all, have long crossed the line into soft porn.
- And from Kevin Maher: And the winner is . . . Hollywood! Yes, they’ve done it again. The greatest image manipulators on the planet have transformed a brutal, dark and scandal-rocked year of sexual harassment allegations into a celebratory night of hope and joy and optimism. No back was left unpatted, no tear unshed, as Tinseltown did what Tinseltown does best — it told itself that it was, you know, awesome.
The UK
- Below is a nice article on how the internet has changed politics for the worse. Almost certainly not only in the UK and the USA. Taster: We now have a politics in which division, mistrust and dislike are no longer regarded as regrettable, but instead as essential to keeping the show on the road.
Nutters Corner
- Here's what Ms Paltrow recommends you do with your coffee dregs . . .
Galicia
- The region's population fell even more in 2017 than it did in 2016 and this trend is forecast to continue over the next 15 years, resulting in a fall from 2.7 to 2.5m by 2031. Likewise, Spain's population will reduce from 46.4 to 45.9m.
Pontevedra
- A shrink I know here has caught the UK NHS bug; he's told the local media that there's no more efficient national health service than Spain's. I suspect the French, for one, might disagree with this. Possibly even some Brits!
Finally
- A guy in India forged an ID card in the name of Omar Bin Laden, compete with a real foto. Why?? Well, one reason might be that his real name is . . . Saddam Hussein.
Today's Cartoons
THE ARTICLE
In the internet age it pays to be offensive: Hugo Rifkind
Bannon and his
hate-project disciples have understood that consensus is dead and the
way to get ahead is to get an enemy
Shortly before
Christmas, a chain of discount shops put out the most deliberately
offensive online advertisement I have ever seen. I won’t tell you
which chain, because they’d want me to and the resistance has to
start somewhere. I’m also reluctant to describe the advert in too
much detail, but let’s just say it featured an elf and a Barbie
engaged in a sex act, and it wasn’t wholly clear that the Barbie
was up for it.
If you were to ask me
who I blame for this happening, apart from the shop and perhaps the
elf, then I would say, “Donald Trump’s former White House chief
strategist”. If you were then to look at me askance and say, “What,
really?”, I would reply, quite firmly, “Yes”.
The former strategist
in question was Steve Bannon, who left the White House last August.
For a peerless example of what he did there and, by extension, how it
turned out bad for Barbie, I would refer you to the passage in
Michael Wolff’s Trump exposé Fire and Fury in which we
hear about the first introduction of Trump’s attempted “Muslim
ban” one Friday last January. For many in the White House, doing it
on a Friday was indicative of his inexperience. Didn’t he realise
it would cause maximum chaos at transit hubs and give protesters
ample time to gather? “Er, that’s why,” replied Bannon,
reportedly. “So the snowflakes would show up at the airports and
riot.”
Turn over the rock of
the early Trump administration and Bannon was the distressing slug
you’d find underneath. Even now he remains central to any
understanding of whatever the hell is going on over there. His
politics is fascinating or terrifying, depending on your perspective;
a hotchpotch of libertarianism, apocalypticism and destiny-infused
Wasp nationalism. If a 1980s Bond villain thinks it, so does he. If
Bannon is to be remembered though, it ought to be less for his
beliefs and more for his strategy for pursuing them.
An early discovery in
internet psychology was the Streisand Effect, named after Barbra
Streisand’s attempts to suppress aerial photographs of her home in
Malibu. Try to suppress something online, she learnt to her cost, and
far more people want to see it. Breitbart, the website Bannon ran
before and after his stint in power, does the same sort of thing with
politics. The more offence you cause, the more you are denounced. The
more you are denounced, the more clicks you get from people desperate
to see what the denunciation is all about. This brings you profit, in
terms of selling adverts, but it also brings you reach. What Bannon
understood, even before Trump’s candidacy, was that hate-reach
wasn’t only as profitable as love-reach, but every bit as
politically useful too.
At the heart of this
great hate project was Bannon’s protégé Milo Yiannopoulos, a
British pundit with a knack for turning out headlines such as “Birth
control makes women unattractive and crazy” and “Would you rather
your child had feminism or cancer?”. Are there people who delight
in reading things like this? Of course. Were they the point? Never.
The point was their counterparts: the people who were so shocked this
sort of thing was being said that they simply couldn’t shut up
about it. Often, they were apt to get a little shrill. In a best-case
scenario, they might begin to rail against the concept of free speech
itself. Whereupon any neutral audience would see a bunch of
calculating jokers on one side and a wild, censorious, rage-filled
mob on the other. Of the two, maybe the latter would seem more
alarming. “Oh lord,” as Voltaire put it, “make my enemies
ridiculous.”
The question of whether
Bannonism and Trumpism are the same thing remains open. Some will
still insist that everything the president does, from his hair to his
tweets, is cunning and calculated; perfectly pitched to provoke
liberal derision, which spurs a passionate, tribal defence from his
base. For me, he seems like more of an idiot savant in this regard,
albeit with less of the savant part. Although maybe that’s just my
liberal derision talking.
Our own politics is not
immune from Bannonism. There is a strong smell of it in our
ridiculous row over blue passports, which unfailingly triggers whole
armies of supposedly tolerant progressives into losing their minds
whenever it comes up, much to the glee of whoever has just brought it
up for precisely this reason. The undead rump of Arron Banks’s
Leave.EU is utterly Bannonite, just thankfully not very good at it.
Likewise, the left-wing Breitbart clone The Canary, which has only
the repeated, incredulous fury of moderates to thank for keeping it
from obscurity. All this is a step on from mere cosy tribalism. It
is a politics in which division, mistrust and dislike are no longer
regarded as regrettable, but instead as essential to keeping the show
on the road.
You might think it
excessive to draw a direct link from any of the above to an elf
molesting a Barbie. I don’t. The lesson learnt by campaigners
online, whether they are doing the bidding of presidents or pound
shops, is that aiming for consensus is a mug’s game. Find an enemy
in the eternal roadhouse brawl of the internet and they’ll
do half your work for you. While achieving consensus might be
impossible, aiming for it is the difference between democracy and
populism.
Put it all together and
you have the great, stupid dilemma of the great, stupid internet age.
Even when we are right to shout, and too often we are, we are still
shouting our way towards something worse.
No comments:
Post a Comment