In the supermarket

"Look at these empty shelves - it's all this panic buying there's hardly any soap left."

Proceeds to load up trolley with what's left of the soap - one, two, three, four.

They promise too much

Only Truth can give true reputation: only reality can be of real profit. One deceit needs many others, and so the whole house is built in the air and must soon come to the ground. Unfounded things never reach old age. They promise too much to be much trusted, just as that cannot be true which proves too much.

Baltasar Gracian - The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

Following on from the previous post, it is worth pointing out that a media and entertainment organisation such as the BBC cannot possibly be impartial. Impartiality is not and cannot be a major aspect of mainstream media businesses. It is an ideal rather than some attainable state and in any event the audience for impartiality seems to be far too small. For mainstream media everything must be framed in a familiar way. The framing has to appeal to both stakeholders and to an audience - it cannot be impartial.

To take a very simple example - in reporting the activities of Greta Thunberg an impartial BBC would recognise that she exemplifies an appeal to false authority. She is not an authority on climate change and her lack of authority would have to frame all BBC reports about her activities. The puppet’s strings would have to be visible.

A related problem affects enormous swathes of BBC reporting. In general celebrities are not authorities on areas of life beyond their professional expertise. This is not to say that outside opinions have no value, but celebrity status rarely adds to that value. In world of mainstream media it obviously adds value, but in an impartial world it would not.

In a similar vein, whenever a minister or shadow minister makes some kind of claim, an impartial BBC would have to provide background sources to the claim - no misleading omissions. It would have to find out who advised the minister and on what basis that advice is deemed to be valid. Yet this is probably not what BBC viewers actually want. They want the cut and thrust of politics not the dull grind of impartial reporting. This is what the BBC clearly wants too.

Another problem would arise from politically influential people. An easy but powerful example has been provided by Jeremy Corbyn with his long history of sharing platforms with political extremists and fanatics who engage in or seek to justify political violence. Skating around Mr Corbyn’s inglorious political history is not impartial.

The BBC generally claims to have an even-handed approach to political debates, but even-handed is not the same as impartial. Mr Corbyn’s political history would be a major factor in any impartial approach to many political debates in the UK. It need not be an issue in the even-handed approach favoured by the BBC. Even-handed can be and often is far less than impartial.

There is no particular need to labour these points because the BBC quite obviously has a corporate culture and like all cultures it cannot be impartial, otherwise it would not be a culture. This is the problem which has to be tackled politically because the failings of the BBC are essentially political. It purports to be more than it ever can be. As Baltasar Gracian wrote over three and a half centuries ago They promise too much to be much trusted, just as that cannot be true which proves too much.

In which case the BBC has to evolve into a commercial business because only this would allow it to be tolerably open about its allegiances. As a media business it must project allegiances because it must appeal to an audience with similar allegiances, an audience which is not and never will be impartial.

Can the BBC be cured?

From the BBC we are told of moves to cure it of something. Apparently it must  "guard its unique selling point of impartiality" without having to admit that it isn't actually impartial. Oh well, it may be a step forward but it's a pretty hesitant one.

New UK Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden has said the BBC needs to do more to reflect the country's "genuine diversity of thought and experience".

Mr Dowden, who recently succeeded Nicky Morgan, made the comments in his first speech in the role on Thursday.

He also warned that the broadcaster must "guard its unique selling point of impartiality in all of its output".

And he questioned whether the BBC is "ready to embrace proper reform to ensure its long-term sustainability".

Trying to cure the BBC's cultural crony virus perhaps?

Okay I'll get me coat. 

No surprises here

Tell and tell again but never listen

Another weird piece from the Guardian -

It’s that time again in the political cycle, where some of the finest leftwing political minds in the country come together to scope out a coherent, principled and sellable policy on immigration, and roundly fail. As part of her Labour leadership campaign, Lisa Nandy, one of the brightest and least entitled Labour politicians of her generation, managed to pull off a remarkable feat – she made a pro-immigration position sound craven...

This fear of looking weak is why the opportunity to take on the Conservative party, and the right in general, by presenting a clear counter-narrative is missed again and again. There is already someone “listening” to people on immigration, already a party that has achieved the job of not making people feel irrational or racist for having anti-immigration views. Labour’s task is not to provide more of the same, but to spell out clearly the colossal trick that the right has played on the country, in taking the despair that should be directed at austerity, the gutting of the NHS, the corporatisation and dehumanisation of the state, and saying clearly that immigration has nothing to do with it.

Clearly immigration can be a problem if it is not managed in some pragmatic way which voters understand and generally favour. Acknowledging this politically is how democracy is supposed to work. There are caveats and limitations to immigration because there have to be and this is so glaringly obvious that even Guardian folk might be expected to see it. Apparently not.

Not really relevant but I'll admit to smiling at the political cycle, where some some of the finest leftwing political minds in the country come together. Not in the Guardian they don't.

I hope.

Blimey who reads this stuff?

From the Guardian -

The Labour leadership contest has exposed new factions in the party

Until 2015, there were four main factional tendencies in the Labour party: the “old right”, the “hard left”, the “soft left” and the Blairites. The old right – rooted in local government and union bureaucracies – has campaigned against radical socialism since the 1940s. The political crises of the 1980s saw the Labour left divide between the hard left of Tony Benn and the soft left led by Neil Kinnock (and, later, Ed Miliband). The soft left wanted to update socialism for a post-industrial age, to expel Trotskyist factions from the party, and to make whatever accommodations it took to win elections. The hard left remained committed to the radical policy agenda developed in the 1970s, despite waning support for traditional socialism among the electorate. The Blairites, advocating free markets and globalisation, emerged as a distinctive section of the party elite in the 1990s, but never had an enthusiastic base among members; they always relied on support from the old right and the soft left to carry out their agenda.

Strewth - ideology certainly is a rum business. One might suggest that Labour party selection committees could narrow down their list of plausible election candidates using a fairly simple filter such as –

Don’t choose an ideologue – they frame things before understanding them.

Don’t choose a self-absorbed turd.

The two are not unrelated, but it isn't difficult is it? Yet I have an idea that simple little mantras such as these do not drive the Labour party selection process. 

You know what freedom means

“You know what freedom means.” But did he? Or, if he knew, had he got it? No, he had not got it. He had had it possibly once, but now it had been stolen from him — stolen from him by Bigges, who was pouring out champagne, stolen by the beautiful saddle of mutton, the currant jelly, the crackling brown potatoes — stolen from him by the cheque-book in his dressing-room table, the roses in the flower bowl, and the electric wires that ran behind the boarding.

Hugh Walpole - Hans Frost (1929)

Freedom is a rum idea isn’t it? Whatever it is I don’t think many people want it which at first sight seems an odd claim to put forward. Yet suppose freedom is essentially the freedom to understand. In addition, suppose that for many people it is possible to understand too much. This is one of the great historical criticisms of the middle class – they don’t understand if it doesn’t suit them to understand. It is genuine too - they really don't understand. Or rather some do but that's a different issue. And as the world becomes more and more middle class, perhaps this is a formidable flock of chickens finally coming home to roost.

For example, simple observation suggests that many folk have no wish to understand aspects of their own ethos, especially fashionable aspects which are supposed to be swallowed whole. Perhaps this still seems odd as an angle on freedom, but it appears to work rather well. It fits well with censorship, attacks on free speech, forbidden language and political attempts to hide, confuse and misdirect. All of these are attacks on our freedom to understand.

Yet when we add up the constraints of daily life as Walpole’s character does, it is easy to conclude that we have no real freedom anyway. On the other hand, the fact that we are able to think along these lines suggest that potentially we do have freedom because we understand how we could have behaved differently and the social effects of doing so.

Walpole's character knew that the beautiful saddle of mutton, the currant jelly, the crackling brown potatoes were trivial indicators of much wider constraints on his freedom. Merely rejecting the currant jelly wouldn't count for much when it came to wider questions of his freedom to think and act.

Even so, freedom still seems to be a matter of paying close attention to our options and choices instead of freewheeling all the time. We have to freewheel some of the time, perhaps most of the time, but not all the time.

This is Spinoza’s key point about understanding things as they are including our own role in things as they are. Not things as they ought to be but things as they are. Observe and understand what is going on, be truthful about it at least to ourselves and be content with that. In this way we may come to understand how and where we could have responded differently even when we didn’t. We may even understand why we didn't.

To my mind this is the great political divide, the one which cannot be bridged. There are those who try to understand themselves and their interactions with the real world and those who merely try to justify themselves. One leads to freedom and the other doesn’t. This seems to be why woke politics, the politics of political correctness is so bleak, repressive and totalitarian.

A diffuse divide as always, but still a divide. There are people who don’t want freedom and don’t want anyone else to have it either. They know they can reject the currant jelly and that seems to be enough. It's as far as they choose to go.