Liz Truss and Boris Johnson: Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

 

Liz Truss promises to ride out the storm,

whilst Boris Johnson says he'll return to his plough. 

 

 

I. 

 

There was nothing new or interesting in Liz Truss's Downing Street speech as she began her tenure as British PM yesterday: it was the usual predictable bullshit from someone who doesn't seem to be aware that she has actually been a part of the UK government that has got us in the present mess [1].

 

It wasn't a virus that wrecked the economy - it was the profoundly stupid political response to such. Similarly, the energy crisis is not something that can simply be blamed on Russia [2]. And one might wonder why, if the British people are so full of courage and aspiring to national greatness, they repeatedly return to office such piss-poor and cowardly politicians?

 

Truss may want to ride out the storm, but some of us are rather hoping that it blows a gaping hole in the ideals, conventions, and fixed forms that we erect like a huge umbrella between ourselves and the forever surging chaos of existence.  

 

 

II. 

Of course, Truss wasn't the only one making a short speech yeserday in front of 10 Downing Street: the outgoing PM, Boris Johnson, also found time to offer us a few final thoughts. And, to be honest, I found what he had to say far more stimulating. 

 

Critics might say the speech only provided further proof of the fact that Johnson's an arrogant liar and narcissist, still in denial about his own spectacular fall from power, but at least he managed to squeeze in a reference to the Roman statesman and military leader Cincinnatus (c.519 - c. 430 BC), and I always appreciate signs of a Classical education. 

 

However, it's highly debatable whether Johnson's self-comparison with Cincinnatus holds good; for whilst the latter was renown for his civic virtue, modesty, and outstanding leadership; the former will probably be remembered for Partygate, golden wall paper and an obsession with net zero. 

 

That said, like Cincinnatus, one suspects that Johnson has little time for those he regards as plebs [3] and that he (not so) secretly dreams of one day returning to power. 

 

Ultimately, the state of British politics is deeply depressing: one rather wishes that Larry the Cat could be Prime Minister; a reassuring feline presence and someone who seems to know what he's doing ... [4]

 

 

 

      

 

Notes

 

[1] Truss has been the Member of Parliament for South West Norfolk since 2010 and has held various Cabinet posts under David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, including Environment Secretary (2014-16), International Trade Secretary (2019-21), and Foreign Secretay (2021-22), so is absolutely complicit in the fact that we are now where we are as a country.

 

[2] The fact that the UK isn't more energy self-sufficient - and has inadequate energy reserves - is not Vladimir Putin's fault.

 

[3] Cincinnatus opposed the rights of the common citizens and when his son, Caseo Quinctius, was put on trial for violently preventing the tribune of the people from meeting in the Forum, he begged that his son be shown leniency. 

 

[4] Larry - who holds the title of Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office - has been the most loved and most trusted member of the present government for the last decade; by far the best appointment made by David Cameron during his time as PM.  

 

 

A Brief Comment on Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party

 

Boris Johnson is merely a gigantic jellyfish, wallowing in the shallows before invariably being washed up, exhausted, on the shores of defeat.* 

 

If those within the Conservative Party who continue to lend him their support only knew how disastrous their loyalty will prove to be, they would be appalled. Fortunately, they are too stupid, too reckless, or too corrupt to care.    

 

 

*Note: I am not the first to have noticed the uncanny resemblance between the UK Prime Minister and this gelatinous free-swimming marine animal. In an article in The Spectator written ten years ago, Isabel Hardman expressed her belief that Johnson was, in fact, a "particularly powerful blond jellyfish" capable of delivering a nasty sting to those who get in his way. 

      It's worth noting also that, in 2013, Johnson called opposition members of the London Assembly great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies, which is ironic, if nothing else. 

          

On Following the Science

Follow The Science Art Print 

Designed and sold by halibutgoatramb

redbubble.com

 

 

When politicians says they will follow the science it means they are abdicating their duty to think and their responsibility to lead; they are hiding behind experts in order to justify their decisions and excuse their inevitable mistakes; Chris Whitty is basically a human shield employed to protect Boris Johnson. 

We repeatedly heard this phrase from UK government ministers during the Covid-19 pandemic - and I'm sure we'll hear it again this winter, if and when they decide to bring back social distancing, reintroduce mandatory mask wearing, and impose a new lockdown.

 

It is, as I indicate, a form of political cowardice and dishonesty, as well as a (perhaps wilful) misunderstanding of how science works; one that relies upon a rather slippery notion of consensus, when, in fact, there is no scientific agreement about how best to deal with a viral pandemic. 

 

Epidemiological models, based on what we have so far discovered about Covid-19, can vary greatly depending on the assumptions made by the modellers and how the data produced is interpreted and then implemented as actual policy. As one commentator has noted, government ministers "can trawl for evidence that suits their purposes or invest selectively in the types of research that are likely to show them in a favourable light" [1].  

 

Ultimately, the public are being misled whenever a politician claims to be simply following the science, even if political choices are (to a greater or lesser degree) informed by scientific findings. This is not because all politicians are liars or inherently corrupt; they may well be sincere in their belief that they are following the best scientific advice. Unfortunately, however, that doesn't guarantee "that this advice reflects an unbiased, unambiguous picture of how different policy options will work out in practice" [2].       

 

It's a shame that members of the mainstream media haven't done more in pointing this out. Too often during the pandemic, journalists simply followed the government's line in the naive belief that they were thereby also following the science. How refreshing it would have been if Laura Kuennsberg, for example, had stood up at a press briefing and reminded the PM that science does not think ... [3]

 

     

Notes

 

[1] Alex Stevens,  'Governments cannot just "follow the science" on COVID-19', Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 4, (June 2020), p. 560.  Click here to read online.  

 

[2] Ibid.  

[3] I'm borrowing the provocative claim made by Heidegger in Was Heisst Denken? (1954): "Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht." See the English translation - What Is Called Thinking? - by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, (Harper & Row, 1968), p. 8.

 

 

Freedom? There Ain't No Fucking Freedom!

 

What the tabloids like to call Freedom Day - June 21st - the day when the UK is due to abandon the last of its lockdown restrictions and allow citizens to finally throw off their face masks and socially interact, is increasingly likely to be postponed amid mounting concern among scientists and government advisors about the rapid spread of the so-called Delta variant (i.e. the mutant version of Covid-19 that was first recorded in India and is thought to be much more transmissable). 

 

Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, is absolutely open to the idea of a delay and one suspects that a significant number of the Great British Public would rather like the lockdown to continue indefinitely, so scared witless have they become over the last 16 months and so happy to have the authorities micromanage their every activity in the name of health and safety (i.e., the greater good as conceived within an era of biopolitics). 

To be honest, I think the cynically-named Freedom Day is a sham and that talk of the world post-pandemic is mostly in vain. Things will never return to normal; our liberty has been fatally compromised and the Great Reset is in motion. We are all now just NHS numbers.

 

To paraphrase D. H. Lawrence writing after the Great War:

We thought the old times were coming back. They can never come back. Each one of us has had something injected into them. So we have to adjust ourselves to a new world. [1]

 

Sadly, in Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock, we have got the leaders we deserve. To quote Lawrence speaking of Lloyd George and Horatio Bottomley, but with Johnson and Hancock in mind:

 

"These two spoke the Voice of the People [...] They said what the vast majority were choking to say. They said it all enormously, endlessly, and with complete success." [2]

 

My hope is that one day we'll remember these two gentlemen with shame:

 

"Why? - Because they said things that were not true, and because they urged us to actions that were meaner, smaller, baser, crueler than our own deep feelings." [3]    

 

  

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 260. The original passage reads: "We thought the old times were coming back. They can never come. We know now that each one of us had something shot out of him. So we have to adjust ourselves to a new world."

 

[2] Ibid., p. 259. 

 

[3] Ibid.  

Build Back Better

Zen fascists will control you ...

  

I. 

 

In an episode of The Inbetweeners, an increasingly frustrated Will ends up describing French exchange student Patrice as a 'fucking baguette eating dickhead frog'. When Simon points out the racist nature of the remark, Will replies: 'He's made me racist' [1], which is not merely an amusing but also a thought-provoking idea. 

 

Similarly, one can't help observing that the seemingly irrational actions of governments here and elsewhere in response to Covid-19 - such as massively curtailing freedom and deliberately wrecking the economy - have significantly contributed to public paranoia; that they have, if you like, made conspiracists of us all.       

Thus it is that previously reasonable individuals who once would have laughed at ideas of the Great Reset and the New World Order, are now beginning to wonder if there isn't some truth in them as they (desperately) try to make sense of what's going on. 

 

They want to know why it is, for example, that politicians the world over - across the political spectrum and including Boris Johnson and Joe Biden - have adopted the mantra Build Back Better and promise us a fairer, greener future with electric cars, social justice, and a universal basic income, whilst insisting we all wear masks and live online.   

II.

This holistic - or, if you prefer, totalitarian - concept of Building Back Better was first discussed at the UN in relation to the issue of disaster management and adopted by the General Assembly as an official programme in 2015. The main principle is to regard crises - including pandemics - as opportunities to create more resilient social structures and economic models than before.     

Prior to this, the phrase had been floating around for several years, used not only by politicians, economists, and members of think tanks, but by the sort of people involved in aid agencies and various NGOs who dream of a safer tomorrow for all the world's children - oh, and a global government run by a technocratic liberal elite who know what's best for everyone at all times.   

Today, key personnel at the IMF, WHO, WEF, and EU, seem to have miraculously arrived at some kind of ideological consensus re the need to Build Back Better. 

 

Of course, it's hardly a conspiracy - more like an open secret - when individuals like Klaus Schwab are unashamedly setting out their visions of a post-Covid utopia and declaring: "The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine and reset our world." [2] 

 

They call this the new normal. And they laugh at those who naively believe we'll soon return to the old ways once there's a vaccine ...

 

Notes

[1] See: The Inbetweeners, S2/E3, 'Will's Birthday', dir. Ben Palmer, written by Damon Beesley and Ian Morris, (original air date 16 April 2009).  

[2] Klaus Schwab (Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum), 'Now is the time for a "great reset"',  article on the WEF website (3 June 2020): click here.  

Boris Johnson - What a Cnut! (Further Reflections on Coronavirus)

King Boris I 

@ BorisForKing

I.

As a matter of fact, King Cnut wasn't a madman who believed he possessed supernatural powers that would allow him to turn back the tide. On the contrary, he was a wise and humble monarch who knew the limits of his own authority and wished to demonstrate to his courtiers that compared to the supreme power of God, the power of all men is vain.

Still, that's not how the legend is remembered or invoked within popular culture: and so, when it comes to Boris Johnson's desperate and deluded attempt to defeat (or at least control) Covid-19, we can rightly describe him as a bit of a Cnut; a man who dreamed as a boy of becoming world king now reduced to faffing about as the tide of events leaves him increasingly looking washed-up.  

What the PM doesn't seem to appreciate is that whereas one can barricade oneself indoors in order to be safe from a pack of hungry wolves, the same strategy isn't going to work when faced with a viral threat. If he spent a little less time studying Churchill and a little more time reading Baudrillard, he might understand this ... [1]


II.

To his great credit, Jean Baudrillard was one of the first philosophers to conceptualise the viral mode and how it corresponds to a form of cultural chaos and confusion, spreading rapidly within a global system lacking immunity. For a viral agent like Covid-19 doesn't just infect individuals, but all sectors of society, including the government, the media, and the world of commerce, thereby exposing the interconnections between pathogens, wet markets, digital networks, etc.  

The fascinating thing is not what Covid-19 does to the body, but what it does to the collective imagination. We might describe the hysteria surrounding the disease as a virtual symptom; one that is induced by the political class and the media and which massively inflates the actual threat posed by the virus. There's no point blaming Boris for this, or, indeed, anyone in particular. For our shared insanity "is a pyramidal synthesis of convergent effects, a phenomena in resonance" [2].

In sum: the current pandemic - just like terrorism - is a product of our own viral culture. And the fact that these things are not just matters of concern for our security services and medical experts but for us all, demonstates that they are not merely episodic events in an irrational world:

"They embody the entire logic of our system, and are merely, so to speak, the points at which that logic crystallizes spectacularly. Their power is a power of irradiation and their effect, through the media, within the imagination, is itself a viral one." [3]

Ultimately, the fight against Coronavirus - just like the so-called war on terror - is futile and unwinnable and, like it or not, we're probably all going to get our feet wet sooner or later ...

Notes

[1] I'm referring here to Baudrillard's four modes of attack and defence: first come the wolves, a visible enemy who attack us directly and against whom we can construct solid defences and arm ourselves with rifles; then come the rats, a rapidly multiplying and subterranean enemy who burrow under our barricades and against whom we must use poison; next are the cockroaches, which do not attack so much as infest and get everywhere, including in the cracks between our defences, making it extremely difficult to ever fully exterminate them; finally, there are the viruses, an invisible enemy transmitted from person to person or in the air itself, infecting the body and requiring the development of a vaccine or acquired immunity. Resistance with lockdowns, face masks, and hand wash is simply a form of Cnutism. See Jean Baudrillard, Fragments, trans. Chris Turner, (Routledge, 2004), pp. 71-2.

[2] Jean Baudrillard. 'Ruminations for Spongiform Encephala', Screened Out, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 2002), p. 173.

[3] Jean Baudrillard, 'Aids: Virulence or Prophylaxis?, Screened Out, p. 6.