ForenSix Opposition - Politics in the Soon To Be Former UK in Autumn 2020

and would keep on interrupting to be cretinous.

you've got to give it her - the guillotine, for that "a new frontier for feminism—the aristocracy" piece. But that would be getting drawn into her pathetic game. I'm just going to ignore her for the rest of my life instead - that'll show her!

that last Fizzles post is v otm

― Uptown Top Scamping (Noodle Vague), Monday, 21 December 2020 16:32 bookmarkflaglink

i was in the process of writing some sort of blog post expanding on my slightly rambly thinking there, but realised this post covers it all very well indeed.

by 'epistemic health' i would mean something like:

• Who and where we get our information from
• How we evaluate that information
• How we build trust around information sources
• How to fix problems of partial knowledge unevenly distributed
• How to deal with problems of authority, trust and information
• How we respond to and represent that information to others - what moral authority can it be said to have?

an obvious example is mask wearing, where there is still room for much uncertainty. mask wearing was scientifically and politically attacked in the US, and totally disregarded in the UK, and in the US it took fairly committed writer-campaigners like Zeynep Tufekci to help raise awareness and change course. However, even now, it's clear that you can change to an intensively mask wearing society as much as you want, but as the US and perhaps to a degree the UK is showing, that won't make up for a context of wider political indifference to the pandemic and structural ways of dealing with it, so that it would be wrong to say 'masks are the solution.' They may not even be a particularly big part of the best sort of response, but become an imperfect necessity when other things are failing, an example of personal responsibility for the failings of the conservative (UK thatcherite) or libertarian state.

i think this mechanism was also noticeable in the presidential election, where a high level of volatility, moral partisanship, and general uncertainty, was immediately forgotten when some people's predictions came true. that context of uncertainty in no way retrospectively validates all the assumptions that were made by the person doing the predicting (especially when they are moral assumptions). and people may be deterministic or probabilistic, but if we are the latter we should probably make an effort to recognise there was a possibility of it going another way, and that this uncertainty is relevant and should be taken into account even after the fact. Nicholas Nassim Taleb is a strange brittle guy, but his black swan and related writings are good on how we shape uncertainty outside of what we know (confirmation bias, 'no evidence of disease' turning into 'evidence of no disease' thinking).

Great post

Certainty is a dud when seen as something to wield as a weapon as opposed to a reservoir of resilience in the morass of public debate imo

I don't know whether this tone of aggro certainty is exacerbated by the context of uncertainty, a response to it, or whether it's just particularly noticeable because it sits so ill in that context of uncertainty.

In the context of coordination of numbers of people, I think that there's often a time to commit to a decision that's usually never at the moment of actual certainty because of surrounding events/necessities, and I reckon that this opportunity cost of certainty has more and more come to be seen as something that is to be seized upon as always a mistake as opposed to the cost of acting in an obscure world.

There's no doubt that always-on news and social media have had a very corrosive effect on the willingness of those tasked with such action to defend this distinction, which is part of the nuance that we're discussing here.

From the certainty thread a few weeks back, i think possibly id also read one of yr tweet threads in advance.

I think "corrosion" is the thing, to what extent the corrosion of certainty in public authority was intentional with malign goals from eg ERG cabal, or benign from eg bloody sunday families, or whether it was merely an inevitable result of facebook ------> is a question, ofc in current terms you can always just point to 2008 onwards and just shrug

The authority of an appeal to expertise and the position of ongoing stewardship of the apparatus of state have each taken a kicking and i still cannot see a better nor more legitimate end authority, albeit that would be an idealised version on that pedestal (so would anyone else's proposed authority, even unto the lack of one, I'd submit)

yes. i wonder as well whether the uncertainty also means it's a good chance for people to play at being expert, because in areas of certainty, expertise is more established, based on knowledge that hasn't just been generated in the last news cycle or whatever. xpost to gyac.

oh yeh, i meant to go on that certainty thread, didn't, and then decided probably a lot of the questions had been thrashed thru so.

Uncertainty

i would agree with those lines i think, yes.

i think corrosion is definitely part of it. i'm sure many people would point at campbell and iraq as being the critical point of that. for me that does raise the question about when the shift from completely hidden political/media interaction controlling what we see happened, and whether it is categorically different. one answer might be that rather than hiding the truth, there is a desire to convince the public of the truth effectively through PR, messaging, spin etc. that if you can do so, you gain a political narrative advantage? in the iraq war it blew up in their face. someone said recently that part of the UK gov's problem was that they saw covid as a public relations problem rather than a public health problem.

whatever the source and history of that corrosion it comes with a concomitant reliance on information sources that are not authoritative. how on earth do you sift through twitter to find the information sources that you trust. there's a lot of work that needs doing there, and there's no guarantee that it won't give you the 'wrong' answers, given the partial knowledge/unevenly distributed problem. as you say, at some point you need to make a responsible bet.

in the iraq war it blew up in their face.

this is not a good line. i mean that this new? desire to own the moral message rather than just hide it in the red tape of whitehall can backfire if you do not succeed in winning that narrative. sometimes people talk about narrative and spin coming up against reality, and while i think that's true, it perhaps diminishes the extent to which people will respond against and in the context of that narrative. i've just realised this is very obviously adam curtis territory, about whom i'm a bit wary, but the structures we put around and within informational uncertainty are powerful shaping forces.

Overpromotion, ambition for further overpromotion, the immorality of incompetence in important roles

At "whitehall" level these are drivers and issues, where they interface with public and where they inhibit positive invested actors are twin secondary outcomes, often media accept the drivers and issues as a given when they are in fact the real scandal

Grenfell the best recent example of some of this, but I mean also everything else too

In early March 2020 a fascistic (not fascist) crept up on us: that 100s of thousands of people were dispensable; that Britain knew better than WHO how to deal with Covid;we didn’t all need to test,trace,isolate;we didn’t need to mask,distance, wash.

— Michael Rosen (@MichaelRosenYes) December 22, 2020

The opening response of this govt, the scientifically illiterate Herd Immunity with no vaccine/ we'll take it on the chin lads, being parroted by supine media without any intelligent scrutiny has been repeated to death by many commentators as a lamentable and irresponsible dereliction of duty although not so much in national media. There is no recovery from a start like that during a crisis imo. Even of lots of thick fuckers will say boris is knocking it out the park and the Tory polling will still hold up, but the fact that the UK govt fucked it and have lied ever since and the so called fourth estate aided and abetted them is still there deep in the national psyche, even if people talk like idiots and say Boris doing a great job under difficult circumstances blah blah under deep hypnosis you could probably extract what they really know!

an obvious example is mask wearing, where there is still room for much uncertainty. mask wearing was scientifically and politically attacked in the US, and totally disregarded in the UK, and in the US it took fairly committed writer-campaigners like Zeynep Tufekci to help raise awareness and change course. However, even now, it's clear that you can change to an intensively mask wearing society as much as you want, but as the US and perhaps to a degree the UK is showing, that won't make up for a context of wider political indifference to the pandemic

A lot of this stuff hasn't been managing the message for explicit political advantage, it has been nudge-unit pop-psych starting from the position that it's the government's job to manage the behaviour of the public and pulling Lever X will generate response Y, etc.

Mask wearing is an interesting example. It was attacked, from a position of expertise, both in the UK and the US, when they didn't want people to rush out and buy up all the stock they needed for healthcare workers. It was then encouraged or mandated, from a position of expertise, when supply met demand.

from that article i linked:

Thus, Thomas Hobson and Daniel Bristow appropriately observe that in the UK the institutions in question were mostly passive rather than active even as they invoked the rhetoric of collective sacrifice. They asked the public to endure and keep on keeping on, even if it was unclear how or why they ought to do so:

For those who may be less aware of the UK’s early approach, Boris Johnson’s government oscillated wildly, making it difficult to discern a plan as such. What appeared clear though, is that there was strong resistance to the notion of the government actually doing anything. Calm has been praised, handshakes have been discouraged and national resolve has been much-cited. Viewed alongside this invocation of Blitz Britain and wartime stoicism, the complete lack of executive leadership, discussion of providing essential resources, mobilisation of industry and population in the service of a common good, is particularly striking, leaving only a myriad of divergent explanations – none of them reasonable – for the UK executive opting for an approach that has been described as “an outlier”, “cavalier”, “reckless”, “insane”.

even if people talk like idiots and say Boris doing a great job under difficult circumstances blah blah under deep hypnosis you could probably extract what they really know!

― calzino, Tuesday, 22 December 2020 10:57 (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

Well if not hypnosis i think water torture worth a shot

darragh right to point out grenfell. the examples of brexit and covid, while exemplary in their incompetence, are in some respects too large to see well. grenfell was an avoidable tragedy, caused by greed, corporate malfeasance, the complicity of regulatory oversight (or rather the lack of it, the loosening of it). but it's in the response as much as anything that you can see the incompetence and indifference. the fact that only four of the recommendations from the first phase of the report have been passed, and the chance to pass more of them relating to fire safety were voted down by Tory MPs. what a perfect example of the complicit forces at play in modern britain, and how they contrive to murder people who don't matter to those MPs, those companies. and ofc as calz says, in the context of a fourth estate which does not seek to expose any of those dynamics, only to brush them under the carpet or excuse them unless they have a political reason not to.

Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but what fizzles describes is to me a global problem, tho the UK is an interesting test case for being uniquely broken. But even in the countries I know where acceptance of expertise is still high, it feels like something fragile and receding.

it's definitely a global problem.

i think part of the point here is that the expertise in itself has shown itself to be contingent - how do we know which expertise to trust and when? what are its outward indicators?

outward indicators of trustworthiness i mean

The demand for expertise to answer perfectly before the requisite information is available is multifaceted in cause, there's barely a faction of any sort that doesn't jump to take advantage of the pause that should be for breath

and was expertise or politics *ever* trustworthy? why? what channels of communication? what gatekeepers? it's probably wrong to see it in binary terms - trustworthy societies have things like a robust mainstream media (if, as I think Daniel implies, that's even possible any more with the failing central business model), or strong and independent non-governmental institutions (universities, scientific and cultural institutions etc).

is it worth looking at trust elsewhere - like in Dan Davies' Lying for Money, where he points out that very high trust societies, like Canada, have surprisingly high levels of fraud, because in a low trust society, you not going to trust someone just because they've rocked up in a suit and have a business card or whatever, whereas business is done a lot of the time on that basis in high trust societies.

or Gambetta's Codes of the Underworld, talking about how in low-trusts societies familial connections, marriage, etc are vital outward controls for and signifiers of trust eg the mafia.

Thank you, Chris Whitty.

Those outward indicators of trustworthiness used to be the checks and balances, right? "Govt can't do something corrupt, the press would reveal it", "govt can't go against the science, scientific authorities will make a fuss and force it into backtracking". This was of course always a fiction to some degree, but now it is cemented as such in most people's minds, and nothing has moved in to fill that gap, leaving ppl to confirm bias their way through the internet.

xposts tbf I think scientific expertise can be seen as "trustworthy" to an extent that political cannot, though obviously the latter influences the former and it's all the same to a lot of ppl

that's losing focus a bit, apologies. but it's a set of questions that i've found really insistent this year. xpost

Those outward indicators of trustworthiness used to be the checks and balances, right?

i think so yes.

on your scientific expertise point, i think in a year when the CDC, and a 'listening to SAGE' government, and indeed the WHO, have all been seen to be complicit in shaping the covid messaging for political rather than epidemiological reasons, it's very hard to maintain that trust with the public, or ask for it to be maintained.

adding 'nudge' thinking to this mix, where you look to shape your messaging according to what you think will drive the optimal behaviour - i cannot think of a worse mode of thought to through into the mix of media and political motivations.

Govt/Public service

The '/' here is a serious battleground, and media/public pay it pretty much zero regard. Its a very underrepresented tension in examination of these things ime (as is everything else bar kuenssberg-level personality-of-major-players panto)

the very publicly reported nudge thinking in the UK at the beginning i think probably did a lot of harm being put as it was under an umbrella of 'sciencey stuff' by the media. xpost

Tangentially related to this, it's amazing to me how quickly the line spread on UK Left Twitter (and other left online spaces, lest this all be reduced to bird app problems) that the new mutation isn't serious, the govt just used it as an excuse because the numbers were growing anyway, and now other govts have called the UK's bluff. I'm not saying I know that's false, but we have no evidence of it being true, either, and I was taken aback at my own willingness to accept it as definitley what's going on rather than as an interesting hypothesis. Consuming my curated feed in the way people used to consume the official narrative.

yeah, i think that's a really good example. Lionel Barber of all people came out with an absolutely garbage statement saying it's now clear the government have over-egged the new strain for political purposes. now while i would love to believe that, i can't see any evidence that suggests that's true. *responsive* curating of your feed in response to the sanity of responses is probably the healthiest thing a person who is on twitter can do tbh.

i did something similar earlier in the year, uncritically sharing a tweet by someone on my filtered feed, because once those people were in, i trusted what they would post. in fact i was wrong to share it. it's not necessarily that person's *fault*, but it does relate to that 'imperfect knowledge, unevenly distributed' problem.

See also “they deliberately want to kill old people!” vs “they are over-confidently applying strategies designed for flu”. The most compelling narrative wins when stories matter more than certainties. See also also “there’s no money left Labour caused the crash”.

And then those stick well beyond the truth becoming clear. Case in point: Leave voters still blame JC more than any Tory PM for a bad Brexit

Fascinating, albeit what you'd expect, from @mattsmithetc at @YouGov on who'd get the blame for a no-deal exit from transition. pic.twitter.com/s0zm0i01fS

— Tim Bale (@ProfTimBale) December 22, 2020

This is wandering away from the focus a bit and is majorly tl;dr but I was talking to a British-Polish friend of mine and I mentioned, from anecdotal observation and reading, the respect that the former communist states had for education and he said that there was no comparable notion of “high culture”. I mentioned that afaict in Britain you see that things like ballet/opera are very gated off by money and its trappings, and that I was surprised, when attending a ballet in Kyiv, that it was accessible to all in terms of price and you’d see ordinary people going in groups. Over here you get HLew sneering “don’t encourage them, Jeremy” when Corbyn was saying that everyone is capable of producing art. Something something the enclosure act of the mind.

I thought then of this article and in particular this part*:

If you get talking to anyone Irish in a bar, they will know all about you in 20 minutes. What I still find wonderful is that the Irish have a great vocabulary. They come out with words you don’t expect. I don’t want to sound condescending, but you don’t expect to hear a road sweeper use a word like ‘recidivist’, which has happened to me in a bar.

I found all the exams talk in the summer infuriating, as i'm sure people will remember, because both sides were equally confident they were correct and both were working from a position of near-absolute ignorance.

But again, they're ignorant though no particular fault of their own.

Twitter and opinion-focused journalism have led to a position where you need to have A Take on everything.

Polling and spying on people's social media doesn't you give a very rich picture of a human mind, sure governments can propagandise and successfully get them to parrot any old soundbite, lefty sheeples can be propagandised by twitter. But remember even thick as fuck people have a device in their skull which is still more complex than the biggest computer in the world and can harbour all sorts of contradictory dualities. They might vote for people they despise, they might RT black lives matter posts while being racist as fuck, they might say Boris is knocking it out of the park when they know he's an incompetent liar, they might parrot degenerate soundbites straight from a CCHQ bot without any conviction and still have a much more complex understanding of things. Fuck knows what I'm driving at here, I'll stop before it becomes a really shit longpost! But perhaps sometimes technocratic-led democracies are so complacent about how much lying they can get away with the dumb as fuck electorate, they don't realise the long term damage they are doing.

England & Wales have a different education system than Scotland and NI, and always have, just for reference.

Wales is mostly devolved now too.

Same curriculum and exams though? Mind you, the Scottish education system is in the crapper these days too. That old cliche about "The benefits of a Scottish education" no longer applies, although you might hear someone like Andrew Neil still trotting it out.

That is an old school Scottish superiority thing: that the English don't even bother educating the working classes whereas everyone gets educated in Scotland, and at a higher level.

i was going to mention in relation to gyac’s post robert louis stevenson’s surprise at the poor education of the english shepherd in relation to his protestant educated bible reading counterpart.

Same curriculum and exams though?

England, Wales and NI qualifications are all broadly similar but Wales and England have been separate for a few years. They're regulated by Qualifications Wales, rather than OFQUAL, and for example, kept A-G grading (rather than 1-9) for GCSEs.

i’m probably not going to put this correctly, but we seem to be discussing in this thread much of the exact same stuff katherine was being “well actually’d” about in the apolitical covid thread, except without the condescension

that was partly what prompted it tbh tracer.

tho as i say it’s been something which has been insistent this year more generally.

If you get talking to anyone Irish in a bar, they will know all about you in 20 minutes. What I still find wonderful is that the Irish have a great vocabulary. They come out with words you don’t expect. I don’t want to sound condescending, but you don’t expect to hear a road sweeper use a word like ‘recidivist’, which has happened to me in a bar.

I did used to know an Irish guy, in a pub I used to drink in, who would try to shoehorn the word 'egregious' into every conversation.

which in itself is... ah nm