Psychoactive Substances: Rolling UK Politics in The Neo-Con Era

The argument that people are too mean to politicians seems more prevalent than the idea that politicians are too mean to each other. Putting the blame for a toxic culture on voters rather than politicians and the press seems grotesquely offensive tbh. They haven't been idly pandering to the base instincts of Real England, they've actively been pressing these buttons as a way of scapegoating immigrants and the poor for the failures of policy and ideology.

That said, despite abstaining on benefit cuts and the 'why I knifed Corbyn' email, Cox would be a long way down the list of the culpable and showed a hell of a lot more bravery in speaking up than the majority of her colleagues.

no question.

Last night I watched people argue repeatedly that the problem is politicians being too mean to each other, that we need a climate of mutual respect. Irrespective of whether political policies respect people or have real devastating consequences in their lives. It's pointless to pretend that this brutal murder, probably committed by a mentally ill man with a long history of being a would-be nazi thug, is not going to be nailed to a host of political agendas. It's already happening, these are the games career pols play, they can't help themselves.

this kinda gets at how i've been thinking about this murder, and i guess many of the recent murders. as much as murders, like anything else, are a product of the society in which they happen, i feel like they p much instantly become political footballs on social media. and that the fight to own "why" it happened becomes very specific and circular. like before the people are even cold in the grave people are arguing that the cause of the murder was something they already believed to be the state of affairs prior to the murder. like the tone is "now you will see what i have been saying, this murder proves it".

it feels kind of strange and perverse. like my memory from childhood or my teens was that when there was a shooting or a murder, a lot of the discourse was the right blaming music or videogames or movies, and the left ridiculing this and saying the person had a mental illness and as such was not evil nor was doom 3d responsible for one act of violence. (and btw there's nothing stigmatising about saying someone had a history of mental illness, i've seen other left-leaning people acting as if it's offensive to say that a murderer had a mental illness. it's not, the more we speak about mental illness the better.)

now it seems like a lot of the left are focused on ridiculing the "he had a mental illness" thing, for every murder. i guess this is in favour of highlighting the hate crime behind a given act of violence, and fine, someone needs to tell both the media and some of the people attacking it that it's possible to have a mental illness and be a bigot.

but a lot of the reactions to murders ultimately feel p traditionally right wing to me - like trying to further vilify a killer by screaming that they weren't mentally ill, that they weren't a loner (even if this is a cliche, isolation is a real problem). i don't really get the end point of this rhetoric, but i don't like where it seems to go. it reminds me of john major's "understand a little less" speech. it seems to allow for more callous treatment of perpetrators. even as i type this i can imagine someone saying "but what about the victims" - again, the kind of argument i can remember having with people who support the death penalty.

to me it seems someone who murders many people must by necessity have severe problems. they deserve sympathy. even if their views are horrible to me.

lastly - i'm seeing a lot of blame on twitter for the tabloids after jo cox's death. as much as i'd like to have a reason to lambast the mail or whatever, i think it's p hard to apportion blame like this. again, it feels like blaming violent movies, or marilyn manson, or videogames. you can prob blame the tabloids in part for the fact that some people have prejudiced views based on incorrect information, but in a liberal democracy this is almost inevitable. i mean you might as well blame the internet - i don't see anyone doing that. nobody is tweeting every day about how many wrong, stupid and hateful articles they find in dark corners of the internet, unlike people do with the daily mail, helping it to be the most popular news site in the world. if the tabloids were creating murderers or fuelling a culture of violence we'd be seeing a lot more of it.

i just think the questions about violence (and the rise of far right groups) are bigger than the answers we tend to come up with. like as a society we are far less violent than ever (again this week some of the "oh what an awful time to be alive" shit on twitter is laughable, we've been alive for longer than 30 years as a species). murders are probably less frequent than ever too. but our reaction to things still seems to be to try and amplify some particular point of view.

in the aftermath of these high-profile murders, i often think that if the killer had got apprehended on the way to do what he was doing, a few hundred thousand fervently argued hard "truths" would all disappear in a puff of smoke.

great post

The internet, or at least it's darker corners, is qualitatively different from the role the papers play in society though - you have to go seek it out, it's not something that you'll see around forming the fabric of culture. "Did you see that thing in Breitbart?" and "Did you see that thing in the Daily Mail?" are very different questions.

in the aftermath of these high-profile murders, i often think that if the killer had got apprehended on the way to do what he was doing, a few hundred thousand fervently argued hard "truths" would all disappear in a puff of smoke.

You've lost me - what kind of "truths"?

will add that the o tempora o mores despair is certainly provoked by transatlantic political brinkmanships coming to a head more or less simultaneously, and that things ought to simmer down a bit soon

and that this was an expressly political murder so it is easier to say that he thought he was doing the bidding of higher powers than people who may or may not have been inspired directly by marilyn manson

but obviously he was mentally ill. tt told me yesterday that it's incredibly dangerous to ignore this fact, just as it's dangerous to stigmatise mental illness

You've lost me - what kind of "truths"?

p much any strongly-argued reaction to the event.

and that this was an expressly political murder so it is easier to say that he thought he was doing the bidding of higher powers than people who may or may not have been inspired directly by marilyn manson

but obviously he was mentally ill. tt told me yesterday that it's incredibly dangerous to ignore this fact, just as it's dangerous to stigmatise mental illness

i agree - i think both the mental illness and the political views need to be taken into account - feel like one of these is often diminished depending on the end goal of the person arguing.

shadow cabinet minister (forget his name) on Newsnight last night talking about the rise in threats against MPs and especially against women MPs and especially on social media - all very true, all very much bad and something to be tackled - and there was talk about how this went up after the Bomb Syria vote, people saying horrible threatening to MPs online, but there's the elephant in the interview and i'm thinking "well you were voting to have people actually irl killed, handwring it however you want to"

if the tabloids were creating murderers or fuelling a culture of violence we'd be seeing a lot more of it.

We are literally seeing a lot more of it. Reported hate crimes against people seen as 'migrants' are rising, unreported hate crimes are thought to be rising even faster.

yeah that is definitely the part of that post that requires more interrogation, think LG is demanding some properly holistic systems thinking of the british people though and this won't happen overnight

xpost i was talking about murder, but i didn't know that about hate crimes against perceived migrants - i guess i'd still find it hard to entirely blame the tabloid news though.

The internet, or at least it's darker corners, is qualitatively different from the role the papers play in society though - you have to go seek it out,

don't think this is true - i see horrible right wing conspiracy stuff in my facebook feed p frequently, and i don't want to see it. in my case, it's friends ridiculing it, but it still shows they're finding it p easily as well. personally i would say the internet, and particularly social media, and even more particularly twitter, have quite easily deepened my interests in the things i'm interested in, which happen to be books/sport/clothes/going out for dinner rather than violent racism.

anecdotal now, but does everyone here have like one or two friends who have posted weirder and weirder conspiracy theory stuff on facebook over time? i know i do. like old school acquaintances or whatever that i eventually unfollowed.

i'm not saying ban the internet, just think it gets ignored a lot when we talk about the role of "the media" in these kind of events, in a world where many people's direct experience of the news is more likely to be in a facebook or twitter feed. no idea if this is true for mair, but equally i've no idea if he read the daily mail, nor presumably does anyone else.

also - if the environment is so poisonous, why isn't everyone affected by it? like people itt are able to say "this poisonous thing is happening" - why aren't those we feel are being tainted by it unable to make that conclusion? what makes this media environment affect one person and not another?

sorry, i meant why are those we feel are being tainted by it unable to make that conclusion...

NV v otm - plenty of space for angry disagreement when your local MP is voting for bombing people/benefit cuts etc.

Calzino has been reasonable - not seeing the fuss.

http://i.imgur.com/0aoOnsJ.jpg

This is just the stuff that doesn't make out migrants support terrorism or that refugees are ISIS sleeper agents. Does it have no effect on the public?

Is it really a stretch to link adverts claiming that remaining in the EU will lead to Orlando-style massacres or calling drowning Syrian children 'cockroaches' in the British paper with the largest national circulation to hostility towards 'outsiders' or linking that hostility towards an increase in violence? Lots of people from minority backgrounds are saying this is the most dangerous political environment they can remember since the early 90s, pre-Stephen Lawrence.

The internet has definitely played a part, both in widening access to Neo-Nazi material that you'd probably have had to send off for by mail order, and adding a sheen of legitimacy to far-right outlets like Breitbart, though.

sorry, i meant why are those we feel are being tainted by it unable to make that conclusion..

A lot of people have made that conclusion. It's not organic, it's being deliberately cultivated in an environment of economic hardship. Tell people that their job moving to a zero-hours contract, their failure to get on a housing waiting list or the closure of local council resources is because of immigration and a proportion will believe it.

It's absolutely not just the tabloids, though. It's broadsheets, the internet, politicians here and abroad and a variety of other factors.

An obvious point but a whole lot of the internet *is* the media, be it the bbc website or people talking about articles in the mailor whatever. Facebook isn't a distinct and inseparable societal influence.

Seperable not inseperable

NV v otm - plenty of space for angry disagreement when your local MP is voting for bombing people/benefit cuts etc.

Calzino has been reasonable - not seeing the fuss.

Second the comment about NV, he is totally otm. Also, the criticism of calzino here was way over the top.

Asked his name the defendant in the dock says "My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain."

His first hearing seems to be going well.

I think it's safe to use NickB's Anders Brexit pun now.

His gardening skills are top-notch tho'.

Where was this reported btw? It's Tim Peake Time on BBC and Sky so no other news exists.

Daniel Sandford of the BBC on Twitter.

Yeah, found a report.

Right, Tim Peake's back, end of story, fuck off now.

NV v otm - plenty of space for angry disagreement when your local MP is voting for bombing people/benefit cuts etc

I just looked and Jo Cox didn't vote to bomb Syria. Did you know that or did you just read 'Blairite' and assume otherwise? Or were you talking more generally? Because "standard Blairite" also shaves off any nuance and leads people to make a load of other assumptions. In any case, Angela Eagle DID vote to bomb Syria and as far as I can tell is still in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet.

At the same time, if an elected representative or other prominent political figure is assassinated then they effectively become a martyr for a cause and it is entirely legitimate to interrogate the extent to which they actually believed in that cause, especially if that person was your constituency MP.

There's no reason that I can see to assume that Jo Cox didn't actually believe a lot of what is being said about her. I think even a lot of so-called Blairite MPs aren't actually pro-austerity or anti-immigration in any case - that certainly wouldn't reflect what happened under the Blair government. There are exceptions (Tristram and friends probably), but I think most of them just see pandering to this stuff as a way of getting elected, after which they hope to pursue policies that go the opposite way. I think this is stupid and destructive and won't really work anyway, but that's neither here nor there.

It's more a reflection of this three-way disconnect between the party, most of its elected members, and many of their constituents that ends up in this dumb triangulation and parroting some of the dumber things that they say. The quote that Conrad highlights upthread is stupid for all the reasons that he points out, and is a reflection of the same shit, but I wouldn't want that to crowd out everything else she's said, a lot of which appears to have been very pro-immigration, considerably more than many of her contemporaries.

There was a decent piece by Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian the other day about why voters who are driven by fear and insecurity don't always make the best decisions, and that it should be really the duty of politicians to resist that and target the root cause of that fear and insecurity. But I think what her husband has said might be the best guide as to her private opinions.

lastly - i'm seeing a lot of blame on twitter for the tabloids after jo cox's death. as much as i'd like to have a reason to lambast the mail or whatever, i think it's p hard to apportion blame like this. again, it feels like blaming violent movies, or marilyn manson, or videogames. you can prob blame the tabloids in part for the fact that some people have prejudiced views based on incorrect information, but in a liberal democracy this is almost inevitable.

Disagree with this fwiw. Railing against the tabloids is in effect railing against a culture that normalises psuedo-fascist language being used to describe immigrants. Obviously outright white supremacists like the killer here have existed in every era and he may not have been directly influenced by the Mail or the Express or any other paper. Most people don't put their tabloid newspaper down and go and vote for outright fascist parties, but a lot of them DO go out and vote UKIP, many of them may see nothing wrong with that UKIP poster from the other day. Meanwhile politicians of all colours play catchup and say shit they clearly don't even believe and the country sleepwalks further into whatever shitshow it's heading into.

The question is whether this week's events are a signpost or a wake-up call. I think and I hope that it's the latter.

At the end of the day newspapers have a deliberate political agenda, violent movies or video games or schlocky metal bands don't, most of the time.

it def feels like the corners of the internet where the really hateful stuff is incubated haven't had enough light shone on them yet, but they're on a continuum with the rhetoric in both broadsheets and tabloids in creating a poisonous cultural climate. or not even a continuum, it goes in all directions, you can see it reflected in colonial kitsch and twee cupcake nationalism as well. but the inflammatory rhetoric on the borderline of incitement is trumpeted loudest by the tabloids. maybe it's not a simple "x causes y" correlation but it's a significant contribution to the environment that these things happen and i'm not sure how you can deny that.

acknowledging the role of mental illness and having that conversation is one thing but that's not what's happening. the "lone wolf nutter" trope is not used to start that conversation, it's used to deflect from deeper causes of violent acts and to absolve us from being part of the underlying social climate. the stigmatisation is a callous side effect because nowhere in this line of thinking is concern for those with mental health issues. handwave it away, reinforce an inextricable link between madness and violence, completely ignore the cuts to mental health services that are yet another political element to this murder.

i know "loners with a history of mental health issues", many of them, and none of them have committed political assassinations.

finally, overstating the climate of fear? fuck off, white people. this campaign has been one reminder after another of how many people in the uk fundamentally don't want people who look like me, or other POC, here. i've spent the week feeling so thankful that i live in london, that my daily life takes place in a safe bubble of sorts. that's why these tabloid front pages are so important, too. i see them every day and it's jarring to say the least. not just in the sense that they can create prejudice, but the fact that you know they reflect existing, deep-seated prejudice that's even worse than the language and lies they use.

I was talking generally around the time of the Syrian vote (distantly thinking more of ppl like Stella Creasy). xps to Matt

Nice one, lex.

"White people" isn't a monolith either. Many of the immigrants who encounter the most hostility are white Eastern Europeans. And the way that Muslims are talked about in this country is not dissimilar to the way Irish people were treated 30 or 40 years ago.

mental illness is almost always raised or allusions made thereto only in an effort to flatten in a this-is-an-entirely-anomalous-incident-that-could-never-have-been-predicted-nor-prevented-and-no-one-is-to-blame-apart-from-this-evil-nutter way

Social media has extended the far right’s reach. Sources tell me that Britain First has only a few hundred members. But its Facebook page has more than 1.4 million likes and churns out nationalist, Islamophobic and anti-immigration memes. “Saying UK borders are secure, open to 500 million people,” declares one meme, which displays a photo of the European Union’s flag, “is like saying my home is more secure with the doors and windows left open.” Another shows Muslims praying in the street in London and asks: “Is this what our war heroes died for?” Many of these are widely shared — and they often echo the coverage of immigration and ethnic minorities found in much of the British press.

This points to an uncomfortable truth: Far-right politics cannot be as easily cordoned off from the mainstream as people would like to believe. Fascists attach themselves to popular causes and drag the debate in their direction. Populists and parties of the center take note and then try to appeal to voters susceptible to the far right’s messages by taking xenophobic positions of their own.

As the referendum approaches, their campaigning has gotten uglier. This week, Mr. Farage unveiled a campaign poster on which the words “BREAKING POINT” were written next to a photo of refugees crossing the Slovenian countryside last August. “If people feel they’ve lost control completely — and we have lost control of our borders completely, as members of the European Union — if people feel that voting doesn’t change anything, then violence is the next step,” Mr. Farage said in an interview with the BBC last month. “I find it difficult to contemplate it happening here, but nothing’s impossible.” This is a typical demagogue’s tactic, a statement so ambiguous it can be read as both a warning and an encouragement.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/opinion/jo-cox-brexit-and-the-politics-of-hate.html

What irked me was Calzino's focus on how bad she was, in which I perceived a glimmer of some sort of justification for this. My bad, apols. Great posts by all of youse btw.

I just looked and Jo Cox didn't vote to bomb Syria. Did you know that or did you just read 'Blairite' and assume otherwise?

If you go over what i wrote I didn't refer to how Jo Cox personally voted, but a comment from a shadow cabinet minister about the social media response to all Labour MPs. The point is that nobody is going to get to make decisions that impact on people's lives in the most drastic of ways and then try to distance those decisions into a realm of abstract "let's be civil about this everybody."

soz, just realised you were talking to xyzzzz really.

Another shows Muslims praying in the street in London and asks: “Is this what our war heroes died for?”

I bet loads of them did and we can all be proud of them protecting our right to religious freedom! Thanks war heroes!

I think it's safe to use NickB's Anders Brexit pun now.

this has been on my conscience a little, so can i just clarify that i made that pun as a rhetorical device to make a hamfisted political point rather than merely for the lolz. i know you all know that anyway, but i just wanted to expressly say so, especially in the light of d0rian's friendship with jo cox. sorry.

lex v otm btw

I realise its a bit naive, as resentments, conflict, downright malevolence won't just disappear, but I always have this vision of a Britain without any national newspapers, and it's like

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BijINQiCEAAbOpu.jpg

acknowledging the role of mental illness and having that conversation is one thing but that's not what's happening. the "lone wolf nutter" trope is not used to start that conversation, it's used to deflect from deeper causes of violent acts and to absolve us from being part of the underlying social climate. the stigmatisation is a callous side effect because nowhere in this line of thinking is concern for those with mental health issues. handwave it away, reinforce an inextricable link between madness and violence, completely ignore the cuts to mental health services that are yet another political element to this murder.

i know "loners with a history of mental health issues", many of them, and none of them have committed political assassinations.

finally, overstating the climate of fear? fuck off, white people. this campaign has been one reminder after another of how many people in the uk fundamentally don't want people who look like me, or other POC, here. i've spent the week feeling so thankful that i live in london, that my daily life takes place in a safe bubble of sorts. that's why these tabloid front pages are so important, too. i see them every day and it's jarring to say the least. not just in the sense that they can create prejudice, but the fact that you know they reflect existing, deep-seated prejudice that's even worse than the language and lies they use.

― the hallouminati (lex pretend), Saturday, June 18, 2016 11:16 AM (2 hours ago)

OTM

Yeah, the money bearing the full load of lex's body mass there

lex totally otm tho I will say that lg's point about claims of this being a uniquely dangerous time are a little ahistorical is well-taken ("the early 90s, pre-Stephen Lawrence" = a heartbeat ago, really)

certainly wouldn't go as far as "laughable" tho, as a passing POC (PnOC? idk it's a stupid term) with non-passing family I've found myself this week succumbing to a bleak despair that I'm sure is part atavistic morbsian apocalypticism, part externalisation of my own shit mindstate and part otm assessment of the state of things, tho I don't have the perspective to determine the exact proportions

good posts itt I'll go back to lurking

acknowledging the role of mental illness and having that conversation is one thing but that's not what's happening

that's not what's happening anywhere ime, this thread is the first time i've seen people accept that both mental illness and a person's political views are part of the issue in a case like this. i'd just argue there are many other factors as well, the media just one of them. social media is like a fever of people shooting down any mention of mental illness, it's very strange.

i know "loners with a history of mental health issues", many of them, and none of them have committed political assassinations.

to me this seems like branding the person a "nutter". is anyone not capable of this kind of act, given a particular set of negative circumstances? it feels like othering them to say "no he did this not because of mental illness but because of his political views" when the views are clearly so wild and the act is so spurious and random.

they reflect existing, deep-seated prejudice that's even worse than the language and lies they use

this is kind of the point i was making really. i don't think the tabloids are creating anything, it seems a bigger question to ask why people hold these views in the first place. you can't stop a paper saying things but you might be able to change the society in which people choose to buy that paper and choose to believe the things it says, and obv in some cases choose to act on them.

Another shows Muslims praying in the street in London and asks: “Is this what our war heroes died for?”

Hey there were Bosniak and Albanian SS divisions, so maybe it was

ie their war heroes are the nazis. Probably shouldn't do wisecracks that need immediate explanation

The tabloids don't create anti-immigrant feeling but they do amplify it and they do legitimise that rhetoric in mainstream society, they make it much much easier for people to pull the old "I'm not racist but" move.

Thing is, the tabloids themselves don't really care about immigration that much, not really. You go into the office of any tabloid newspaper and there will be immigrants of all kinds working at all levels and in all kinds of jobs, and plenty of them. But fostering immigration panic is the surest means to an end - ie withdrawal from the EU - which they want for commercial and influence-based reasons that aren't really connected to immigration. It's irresponsible and it's dangerous, but if Brexit does happen then watch all these immigration headlines just melt away.

(And watch Human Rights become the new EU, almost immediately).

lex otm, matt dc otm.

i am sympathetic to what you say lg but i don't think the mode of response that focuses on the media etc is typically right-wing at all, much more aligned to classic forms of leftist structural analysis, cultural studies etc. the focus on mental health, as we've seen it, seems to me like a sleight of hand - pretending that you're talking about something deep in our society that we have to contend with (despite probably being someone who's never cared about mental health issues before) when in fact you're using it to place all of the blame on the individual with no further thought necessary

xps