The BBC - still sitting on its hands

The Express treats us to yet another piece on the increasing irrelevance of the BBC. Familiar stuff yet strangely fascinating - rather like watching the EU pootle along hoping for the best.

BBC in crisis: Broadcaster's future at risk over failure to adapt - ‘I won’t pay’
THE BBC may face a further funding blow next year if pensioners refuse to start paying to watch the national broadcaster, placing the future of the broadcaster at risk...

Mark Thompson, a former BBC director-general who is now chief executive at the New York Times, revealed in a speech last month that the average viewer of BBC One alone is now 61.

Tony Hall, the BBC’s director-general since 2013, is not too concerned about the changes.

He said in September: “I believe this is a huge opportunity for people like us.

“In this market, services that are distinctive and different will stand out.”

That last sentence sounds like the kiss of death to me. The BBC already provides a service that is distinctive and different because people can be dragged off to court and even jailed if they don't pay for its compulsory user licence. The trouble is, people notice.

Sit on your hands, apply political pressure whenever possible and hope for the best. It's the bureaucratic way.

Fried bread

Autumn Colour

Yesterday we headed off on one of our favourite moorland walks, knowing it wouldn’t be too boggy. Before setting off we popped into a popular cafe and treated ourselves to a traditional bacon and egg breakfast with most of the usual goodies – bacon, egg, sausage, tomatoes, mushrooms and of course fried bread. A rare breakfast for us but most enjoyable, especially the fried bread.

I’m not sure why fried bread is so delicious. Really it is only a kind of fatty toast, but delicious it certainly is. I could have eaten more but nobly restricted myself to one slice.

The walk was fine in spite of the cold, low cloud and poor visibility. Very autumnal it was, with lots of colour still left on the trees. It rained continuously as we made our way back off the moor but that didn’t detract at all from the walk. It can be very atmospheric walking in the rain, especially after fried bread.

We are routinely outplayed

There are many times when a chess player must admit that he or she has been outplayed. Lose gracefully, learn from the more obvious mistakes and live on to fight another day – that’s the only way to deal with it.

Similarly we the UK electorate have regularly been outplayed by the establishment. Political life and political choices are narrowing and moves which might favour the ordinary voter are not being made. Unfortunately we are unlikely to learn much from being outplayed even though Brexit showed us how crudely the establishment defends itself when taken by surprise. The establishment may not be particularly smart but it has the money, the time, the staff and the unimaginably vast networks of patronage.

It seems to be an unfortunate weakness of democracy that too many voters are too easily persuaded to cast votes which are obviously poor moves in the political game. Too many vote tribally, too many do little or no research into the people they vote for and too many opt for simple answers to deal with situations which are so fluid and so complex that there cannot possibly be simple answers. This much is frequently obvious but still we get the simple answers.

The great mass of voters do not spot and take advantage of collective political opportunities such as Brexit or the emergence of new and more dynamic political parties. Too often the same cross goes in the same box against the name of the same stooge, lunatic or crook.

Ours is no longer the culture which emerged victorious in two world wars. It is not sufficiently self-confident and adaptable to play realpolitik successfully. This is what winding down looks like from the inside. It’s our own fault.

Tipping point - when it all began to go wrong

The moment in modern civilisation equivalent to the fall of the Roman Empire was the First World War... most particularly almost exactly one hundred and three years ago the Battle of the Somme in 1916 when we threw away the flower of our manhood.

It's a point of view worth preserving because something clearly has gone wrong and something clearly was thrown away round about this time. 

Fabricated ignorance

The Witches' Ride

I’ve been thinking about ignorance recently. What do I know about ignorance? Quite a lot I suppose, but ignorance is a rum notion isn’t it? Throughout human history there has been a type of knowledge which is not knowledge at all because it is wrong, obsolete or simply nonsense.

For example, any modern person may understand the social pressures whereby witches came to be accused of witchcraft. Yet it is not possible to know how witchcraft actually works because it doesn’t. Nobody ever knew in any meaningful sense so it is not possible to be ignorant about the workings of witchcraft.

Obviously we may be ignorant of many things, ignorant of facts, social conventions or quirks of personality, but some forms of knowledge are fabricated. Fabricated knowledge serves a number of purposes, political, social and economic and is often used to establish a form of social superiority via fabricated ignorance.

Suppose we invent an idea –

Mortifying as it may be so some observers, the thematic betrayal or certain obscurantist norms in wider fields of observation than is usual for such arcane matters will in the end have a debilitating thrust is spheres far removed from its intransigent beginnings.

What does this mean? It means nothing.

Conventionally it seems as if anyone could be ignorant as to the meaning of the statement. Yet the statement is meaningless so ignorance about its meaning is ignorance about nothing - in other words fabricated ignorance.

Similarly one may be ignorant about astrology. Not the public face of astrological prediction, but its supposed working principles. Here again, as astrology is nonsense it is not possible to be ignorant about astrological mechanisms because there aren’t any. This would be another example of fabricated ignorance. It wasn’t always the case of course, because astrology was consistent with early cosmology, but now it isn’t consistent.

In general, those who dabble in nonsense defend the nonsense by suggesting that critics do not understand it so the critics are simply ignorant. Similarly those who see little value in attempting to understand it are equally ignorant. It’s a dilemma for the critics – a fabricated dilemma.

As we know, proponents of gender politics are engaged in a battle against biological facts. Anyone who asserts that there are only two genders is supposedly ignorant about the social nature of gender. Again this is an example of fabricated ignorance - gender is not socially assigned.

The catastrophic climate change narrative is much the same. A core aspect of the narrative revolves around fabricated ignorance. One has to be an approved climate scientist or a celebrity to understand why catastrophic climate predictions are valid says the narrative. Anything less is ignorance.

Yet as nobody knows how to make those predictions there is nothing to understand and therefore no ignorance. This gives narrative proponents an inbuilt advantage because it inevitably draws critics into an impossible swamp of drivel as they do not wish to stay on the sidelines and be dismissed as ignorant.

This seems to give us a key point. A vital aspect of the climate narrative has been the manner in which it aims to fabricate ignorance within the general population, including bureaucrats, journalists and politicians. It does not build knowledge so much as fabricate ignorance. That remains the core political aim.

Grandad, did you vote against the communists?

Admittedly it’s an over the top title, but how does any sensible person cast their vote at the forthcoming general election? The House of Commons has been a disaster zone ever since the Brexit referendum unexpectedly kicked it in the nuts and none of the parties has any credibility left.

The Lib Dems don’t care about the referendum result, the Greens are fascist extremists and Labour has saddled itself with a bunch of idiot communists. Does a Leave voter abstain, vote for the Brexit Party or vote for Boris?

To my mind the only thing to do is vote for the person who seems to be the most capable and pragmatic local candidate. The trouble with that is we have political parties calling the tune and at the moment we have some outstandingly malign and undemocratic parties, particularly Labour.

Hence the title of the post. We need to vote against extremist loons and however unpalatable it may be to admit it, the Tories are not extremist loons. Conservative in name only perhaps, closet socialists perhaps, somewhat loony perhaps, but not as viciously extreme as the alternatives. A vote for Boris may be unpalatable, but to my mind there is no pragmatic alternative.

In for a flogging?

But he learned some social lessons. The Clara School was a school for the children of the better classes, for the people of the district were well off. The boy wore leather breeches and greased leather boots which smelt of train-oil and blacking. Therefore, those who had velvet jackets did not like sitting near him. He also noticed that the poorly dressed boys got more floggings than the well-dressed ones, and that pretty boys were let off altogether. If he had at that time studied psychology and æsthetics, he would have understood this, but he did not then.

August Strindberg – The Son of a Servant (1886 - 1909)

I have a suspicion that this little episode is a pointer towards the origin of Jeremy Corbyn’s entire political philosophy. Not so much his social background but his sense of inferiority rooted in a well below par school performance. He has always known why the other boys would never copy his homework.

He isn’t well-dressed either, and certainly isn’t pretty, so does that mean he’s in for an election  flogging? I do hope so.