Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Admiral Yi]

From what I've seen - no. Although there is form for this.

That Buckingham Palace curator got a walk too.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah, Anthony Blunt the "fourth man" (and again - rather sympathetic dramas made about his life and, indeed, all the other Cambridge Five).

Off the top of my head the only Soviet spy who was actually prosecuted was George Blake and he escaped prison so managed to get to Moscow. He died a couple of years ago and was buried with full military honours in Moscow.

[Josquius]

This is fascinatingly terrible

BBC News - Oxford residents dubbed 'guinea pigs' over traffic policy
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-64223058

So... There's a group pushing the idea that a city actually taking steps to improve itself is part of some evil global conspiracy.
Particularly odd as its a known fact that oil companies historically (and likely today too)
 have actually conspired to influence things to align with their interests.

Basically in fighting the evil globalist conspiracy.... They're actually the ones supporting the closest we have to such a thing.

[Sheilbh]

It's really weird. Saw a media journalist wondering about this earlier in the week because apparently there are just loads and loads of videos on TikTok about how Oxford City Council's traffic calming measures/cyvling infrastructure are part of a massive global conspiracy.

No idea how it happened or got picked up by sort of international conspiracy folk

[The Larch]

And apparently Right said Fred support them. First vaccines and now this... I want to be able to enjoy partying to "I'm too sexy", but they're making it increasingly difficult.

[Sheilbh]

And apparently Right said Fred support them. First vaccines and now this... I want to be able to enjoy partying to "I'm too sexy", but they're making it increasingly difficult.

Needless to say they're also pro-Russia on Ukraine.

But they are a really weird example of the strange left-right shifts around right now. I think it's probably only 10-15 years since one of them was pondering a joke run at Mayor of London on relaxing drugs enforcement by the Met and getting beat up at a gay rights rally in Moscow. I've no doubt they'd still support both of those things - but congruent to that (for them) is anti-vax, anti-lockdown, anti-Ukraine, "globalist" conspiracy theories.

[The Larch]

And apparently Right said Fred support them. First vaccines and now this... I want to be able to enjoy partying to "I'm too sexy", but they're making it increasingly difficult.

Needless to say they're also pro-Russia on Ukraine.

But they are a really weird example of the strange left-right shifts around right now. I think it's probably only 10-15 years since one of them was pondering a joke run at Mayor of London on relaxing drugs enforcement by the Met and getting beat up at a gay rights rally in Moscow. I've no doubt they'd still support both of those things - but congruent to that (for them) is anti-vax, anti-lockdown, anti-Ukraine, "globalist" conspiracy theories.

 

[Josquius]

Some say the right - left axis is a horseshoe. Get too far to one extreme and you almost loop around to touching the other.

I increasingly think what we in fact have is more a tight rope. Or more accurately a tapered platform - thick in the middle but increasingly narrow as you go to the extremes.
The closer you get to these extremes the more likely you are to fall off and into the pit of lunacy below where its all just thrashing lunatics who think the world is against them.

[Sheilbh]

I think you can push it too far, but I think there's a lot to this piece by Ross Douthat:

How the Right Became the Left and the Left Became the Right
Nov. 2, 2022
By Ross Douthat

One of the master keys to understanding our era is seeing all the ways in which conservatives and progressives have traded attitudes and impulses. The populist right's attitude toward American institutions has the flavor of the 1970s — skeptical, pessimistic, paranoid — while the mainstream, MSNBC-watching left has a strange new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A. The online right likes transgression for its own sake, while cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and worries that the First Amendment goes too far. Trumpian conservatism flirts with postmodernism and channels Michel Foucault; its progressive rivals are institutionalist, moralistic, confident in official narratives and establishment credentials.

These reversals are especially evident in a pair of prominent headlines from the last week. If you had been told at any point from, say, 1970 to 2005 that a disturbed-seeming man living in the Bay Area with a history of involvement with nudist activists and the hemp jewelry trade had allegedly followed his paranoid political delusions into a plan to assault an important national politician, the reasonable assumption would have been that his delusions belonged to the farthest reaches of the left and therefore his target was probably some notable Republican.

By the same token, if you had been told in George W. Bush's presidency that a trove of government documents would reveal the Department of Homeland Security essentially trying to collude with major corporations to regulate speech it considers dangerous or subversive, an effort extending from foreign threats to domestic ones, you would have assumed that this was all Republican overreach, a new McCarthyism — and that progressives would be up in arms against it.

In our world, though, things are otherwise. The man who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi while hunting the speaker of the House did, seemingly, belong to left-wing, Left Coast culture in the not-so-distant past. But at some point in his unhappy trajectory, he passed over to the paranoias of the extreme right — probably not in some semi-rational radicalization process in which he watched too many attack ads against Nancy Pelosi but more likely in a dreamlike way, the nightmares of QAnon matching his mental state better‌ than the paranoias of the left.

His journey's violent endpoint was singular and extreme, but this kind of left-to-right migration has more normal correlatives: the New Age-QAnon overlap, the Covid-era migration of formerly left-wing skeptics of Big Pharma onto right-wing shows and platforms, the way that all doubts about the medical establishment are now coded as right-wing, Trumpy, populist.

And the political right's response to the Pelosi attack reflects these shifts as well. The ethos of Fox Mulder in "The X-Files," "Trust no one," is a now dominant value on the right, which in this case encouraged a swift leap from reasonable questions about the details of the assault, based on inaccurate initial reports, to a very specific narrative about a gay assignation that the cops and the Pelosis were presumably covering up.

As of this writing, several public references to this theory from prominent conservatives have been deleted. But the cover-up narrative will probably survive indefinitely as a reference point, an underground "truth," like the left-wing conspiracies of old.

One of those deleted tweets belonged to Elon Musk, the new impresario of Twitter, and it inevitably became an exhibit in the case for liberal panic over his takeover: What could be more indicative of the platform's imminent descent into a democracy-destroying hellscape than conspiracy theories spread by the Chief Twit himself?

But the alternative to Musk's reign was clarified by the second recent illustration of our left-right reversal: a story from The Intercept, by Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein, detailing the Department of Homeland Security's migration into the social-media surveillance and the pressure the department has tried to exert on internet companies to flag and censor content along lines favored by the national security bureaucracy.

On the surface, this is not a partisan story: The Intercept is a left-wing publication, and the current version of the D.H.S. anti-disinformation effort got started in the Trump administration.

But everyone understands those efforts' current ideological valence. The war on disinformation is a crucial Democratic cause, the key lawsuit filed against the Biden administration on these issues comes from Republican attorneys general (joined by doctors critical of the public-health establishment), and the most famous flashpoint remains the social-media censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which Fang and Klippenstein suggest followed from what one could reasonably call a deep-state pressure campaign.

Meanwhile, according to a draft report from the D.H.S. obtained by The Intercept, the list of online subject areas that the department is particularly concerned about includes "the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine" — mostly areas where, whether in wisdom or in folly, the populist right is more likely to dissent from the establishment position.

And for the future of Twitter, in particular, it's notable that the Intercept story first points out that a committee advising DHS on disinformation policy included Twitter's then-head of legal policy, trust and safety, Vijaya Gadde, and then notes that Gadde was one of the first people fired by Musk. It's a tacit nod to the left-right switch: Under Musk the social-media giant is widely seen as moving "rightward," but that could mean becoming less entangled with an arm of what was once George W. Bush's national security state.

The point of emphasizing this reversal isn't to suggest that either side is likely to flip back. The evolving attitudes of right and left reflect their evolving positions in American society, with cultural liberalism much more dominant in elite institutions than it was a generation ago and conservatism increasingly disreputable, representing downscale constituencies and outsider ideas.

But a stronger awareness of the flip might be helpful in tempering the temptations that afflict both sides. For progressives, that could mean acknowledging that the Department of Homeland Security's disinformation wars, its attempted hand-in-glove with the great powers of Silicon Valley, would have been regarded as a dystopian scenario on their side not so long ago. So is it really any less dystopian if the targets are Trumpistas and Anthony Fauci critics instead of Iraq War protesters? And if it is a little creepy and censorious and un-American, doesn't that make some of the paranoia evident on the right these days a little less unfathomable and fascist seeming, even a little more relatable?

Then the Fox Mulder right might benefit from recalling the thing that conservatives — or this conservative, at least — used to find most insufferable about the anti-establishment left, which was not its skepticism but its credulity, not the eagerness to question official narratives but the speed with which implausible alternatives took root. (If parts of Oliver Stone's "J.F.K." make you understand where conspiracy theories come from, the part where the conspiracy gets "explained" should make you a Nixon Republican.)

This is the key problem with the right today, whether the issue is the 2020 election or the Covid-vaccine debate or the attack on Paul Pelosi. Not the baseline of skepticism, not being attuned to weaknesses and inconsistencies in official narratives, not being open to scenarios of elite self-dealing and conspiracy and cover-up, all of which emphatically exist. It's the swift replacement of skepticism with certainty, the shopping around for any narrative — even if it comes from Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell — to vindicate your initial theory, the refusal to accept that even institutions you reasonably mistrust sometimes get things right.

Or to put this in terms of Musk and his hopes for Twitter: The ideal virtual town square would be a place where conservatives could discuss speculative, even conspiratorial theories of the day's events — but also a place where they could be persuaded to abandon bad theories when the evidence dissolves them.

Social media and tribal incentives being what they are, that seems exceedingly unlikely. But if I had just paid billions to own a social media platform — and become both its main character and arguably the most important right-leaning figure in American life, pending the Donald Trump-Ron De‌Santis slugfest — I would be thinking about what it would take for a spirit of contrarianism and rebellion to aim not simply at transgression but at truth itself.

I think you see it with more unexamined, maybe slightly naive approaches to the world.

If you described a bald, bisexual popstar who wants to decriminalise drugs and likes going on gay rights rallies around the world - 10 years ago I would not have been surprised to discover that he was also anti-big pharma and the Western alliance. So, in a way, why should we be now?

Similarly I think of John Lydon's pro-Brexit, pro-Trump line ("Trump's the real punk") - it's not that odd given his entire approach for the last 50 years has been to provoke pearl-clutching from chat show hosts.

I think they're both wrong in different ways - but I think it's also linked to what made them "right" or interesting in the past and in both cases a warning against letting your politics be dictated by the affect you cause/reactions you provoke.

[Josquius]

I'm not sure how relevant much of that is to the UK. Apart from maybe an unwritten sub article on how our nuts fall in with American nuts and copy and paste their shit sans context.

I really do think the key in America is that the important matter these days is not left vs right but authoritarianism vs dictatorship. With two flavours of right, one horrid and the other by default good just because it isn't anti democracy.

A key factor there is when nuts get arrested for terrorism from the right they are very much republican supporters whilst left wing nuts tend not to be big on the Democrats. You do see this a fair bit in the UK too post and pre corbyn.

I suppose what we have in the UK is really an inverse. The establishment are solidly right wing and the government has been tory for over a decade. The nutty left hate them and everything associated with them as a matter of course-broken clock moments to be argued against even in isolation. Even the civil service and apolitical decisions a sign of the beast at work.

The nutty right meanwhile say the tories are a bunch of communists and disown them.

What I find really curious is not that they find reasons to hate the same groups but those occasions when the nuts from both sides land on exactly the same counterfactual and even seem to collaborate.

[garbon]

I see yet another horrific case of Met police officer abusing his badge.

[Sheilbh]

I see yet another horrific case of Met police officer abusing his badge.

It's sickening.

Again within the more elite parts of the Met too, like Couzens - and nine incidents reported during his time on the force (which ended because the women either refused to cooperate or withdrew their complaint). Also his work nickname was "bastard Dave" which again is reminiscent of Couzens who was nicknamed "the rapist" by his colleagues.

There may be some police who are really good at covering their tracks and fooling their colleagues into thinking they're just nice guys - but I think a lot of them are probably exactly the people their colleagues think.

Edit: Also, as with Couzens, he would flash his warrant card to tell women he was a police officer so they could trust him.

[garbon]

Is Rishi getting serious about gender going to help him with Scotland?

[Sheilbh]

Is Rishi getting serious about gender going to help him with Scotland?

I imagine not. He's probably watched what happened in Australia as closely as the rest of the Tory party. I suspect it's the other way round - the SNP passing legislation (which it's not clear is particularly supported by Scottish voters, if you ask a very high level question people are very supportive, if you ask about the specific measures then they're opposed) in order to provoke a politically helpful constitutional row with Westminster.

The UK government has, in my reading, a pretty decent argument that the Scottish government doesn't have the power to pass this legislation and that it should be blocked because it affects the operation of equalities law, which is reserved to Westminster.

Stephen Bush set out the legal points really clearly in the FT today - and pointed out that if the SNP wanted to pass this reform they could do it in a way that doesn't cut across reserved matters. But even someone like Shami Chakrabarti - who was a great human rights lawyer at Liberty before she was a made a peer by Corbyn and joined his shadow cabinet, so not a natural sympathiser with the government - has said that there's a pretty good case this legislation cuts across reserved powers.

[Jacob]

What happened in Australia Sheilbh?