F Rosa Rubicondior: Politics
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts

Monday 4 March 2024

Anti-Vaxxer Conspiracists News - How Trumpanzee Cult Conspiracists Are Risking People's Lives For Money While Feeding Populist Extremism


Anti-vaccine conspiracies fuel divisive political discourse | The University of Tokyo
According to a news item carried today by Agence France-Presse (AFP), US antivaxx conspiracists are deliberately spreading fear and disinformation to sell quack medical kits to gullible fools and in doing so are risking the lives of anyone foolish enough to believe them. And a recent paper published by a Japanese research group has shown how extremist parties are trading on growing antivaxx paranoia, originating in Trump-supporting conspiracists in the USA, by incorporating it into the political platforms.

This team of researchers recall how Donald Trump first of all tried to take credit for developing the mRNA vaccines against Covid-19, as though he had personally directed the research and invented the science behind mRNA vaccines, then switched to curry favour with the antivaxxers by casting doubt on the need for boosters. And of course, antivaxxer conspiracy theories became a central theme of the rabidly pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theorists.

Firstly, the AFP report:

Sunday 25 February 2024

Trumpanzee News - How QAnon Lured Gullible People Into The Trumpanzee Cult


How people get sucked into misinformation rabbit holes – and how to get them out

From our perspective in Europe, it seems almost incomprehensible how the political situation in the USA has degenerated to such an extent that Donald Trump may be elected as POTUS again, despite the incompetence, buffoonery and criminality that characterised his earlier term.

What was once the 'shining beacon on the hill', which set the rest of the world an example (albeit more than a little idealised) of how democracy operated to produce a prosperous, egalitarian society where aspiration and enterprise were rewarded and the economy worked for all, has degenerated to warring factions, full of mutual hate and fueled by the most ludicrous and lurid conspiracy theories.

A significant number of adult Americans now believe there is a 'deep state' run by senior Democrats, that operates as a Satanic paedophile cult and that the serial adulterer, insurrectionist and crook, Donald Trump, was personally appointed by God as their saviour, because God obviously takes a keen interest in US politics and would pick someone with a narcissistic personality disorder to do his work for him. This god also promised to ensure Trump was reelected 2020, so the fact that he was kicked out of office must have been due to the same deep state/Democrat conspiracy to steal the election - and then hide the evidence where even God can't guide Trump's supporters to it.

And of course, the serious criminal charges Trump is now facing in a number of different US courts, are all part of that conspiracy, as are the judges, prosecutors and prosecution witnesses, so the more damming the evidence and the more charges he faces are evidence of the conspiracy, not evidence of Trump's guilt and unsuitability to hold elected office, let alone be in charge of a nuclear arsenal and the US public finances, and able to appoint senior members of the judiciary.

The only real conspiracy in the USA is that run by the shadowy and rabidly far-right, pro-Trump QAnon, so how did the QAnon cult lure so many people down their particular paranoid rabbit hole to the extent that they are prepared to take up arms against their fellow countrymen and stage an attempted coup d'etat in the name of patriotism?

Monday 11 September 2023

Conspiracy Loon News - Why Some People Fall For Wackadoodle Conspiracy Theories


They fall more easily for conspiracy theories - Linköping University

In the last 20 years of so, two things have featured in western culture, especially so in the United States, and recent research has shown how these are linked.
  1. Democratization of opinion: Conflation of the belief that everyone is entitled to their opinion on every subject under the sun, as guaranteed to Americans by their constitution, and the belief that this means every opinion should carry equal weight in a debate, regardless of the evidence (or lack of it) on which it is based, or the level of expertise in the subject of the person voicing that opinion.

    The attractiveness of this belief to the intellectually lazy and to those who feel alienated by the political and economic forces that shape their lives, is that they can tell themselves that they are at least the equal of the experts, and very probably their better.

    For example, I was recently castigated in the social media when I disagreed with the claim that "everyone needs Jesus because without Him life is meaningless". I was informed that "This is America (it was actually Facebook!) where we are entitled to our opinions!", as though a constitutional right in one country mandates the rest of the world to respect dogma and regard it as a statement of irrefutable truth, with the implication that no-one has a right to disagree. The constitution guarantees my right to my opinion (but not your right to yours).

    Similarly false claims are made by creationists daily in social media, accompanied by indignation when challenged. Creationists who couldn't define the terms 'evolution' or 'kind' and who assiduously maintain their scientific ignorance, will confidently inform the world that the millions of highly qualified working biomedical scientists who have no difficulty with the science, have it all wrong, and should listen to the creationist who knows best, having completed a 15 minute Google University degree in creationism. And they're all part of a gigantic Satanic conspiracy anyway.

Sunday 16 April 2023

Human Evolution - What Darwin Got Wrong, and Why the Far-Right Embrace Social Darwinism

Human Evolution

What Darwin Got Wrong, and Why the Far-Right Embrace Social Darwinism

Racist and sexist depictions of human evolution still permeate science, education and popular culture today

The far right in politics have never been bothered about truth.

They have no concerns about the scientific validity of the claimed scientific basis for their belief in their superiority over other peoples. It's whatever excuse they think they can get away with that's importan,t and more often than not, religion provides that excuse for them.

So, while simultaneously appealing to the Christian fundamentalists who reject Darwinian evolution on doctrinaire grounds, they sell the notion of white supremacy and male superiority over women based on Darwin's social ideas, so-called social Darwinism, that Darwin got from the Christian culture he grew up in.

While Social Darwinism has been rejected by the egalitarian left in politics as having no scientific basis, it is ironic that this is the only aspect of 'Darwinism'; that the far-right embraces, but it's closeness to Christian fundamentalism makes it doubly attractive to them.

Charles Darwin, who trained for the priesthood as a young man before turning to biology, was a man of his age and took it as established fact that there was a racial hierarchy in the world and that men were naturally superior to women, because that was the reality he saw, but the reality he saw was the result of 18 centuries of Christianity. Rather than question those basic cultural assumption on which English and European imperialism depended, and which seemed to be borne out by its success in dominating the world, he looked for a scientific basis for them in the framework of the evolutionary biology he and Wallace had identified as the explanation for biodiversity and the origin of species.

Darwin was right about a great deal, but fundamentally wrong about the biological superiority of white males. Indeed, given that all species, and all races have been evolving for the same length of time, and the process of evolution has no goal but is shaped by the prevailing local environment, it makes no sense at all to talk about one species or race being more highly evolved than another. All living organisms are more or less perfectly adapted by natural selection to fit their evolutionary niche and when their environment changes, the pressure to adapt changes. There is no pinnacle; no supreme achievement of evolution. All species are liable to find themselves less than perfectly adapted to a changing environment in different places at different times and to evolve accordingly.

But Darwin saw a hierarchy, both racial and sexual - and a hierarchy that the Christian religion he was raised in accepted as the natural order and promulgated it as the right and proper form of society, much as white supremacist Christians do today, so he saw his task as explaining what he saw rather than explaining why the 'natural order' was an illusion created by circumstance. In the words of the Anglican hymn, written in 1848, just 11 years before Darwin's Origin of Species was published:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.
The circumstance was, as Jared Diamond points out in his book, Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years due to the good fortune of Europeans having several domesticable animals in Eurasia so Europeans had horsepower for work whereas much of the rest of the world never had more than manpower. Europeans also co-evolved with a range of viruses, mostly acquired by living in close proximity to domestic animals, so when they came into contact with the rest of the world, their germs devastated their societies and weakened their resistance to colonial powers.

As Diamond points out, had Bantus been able to domesticate rhinoceroses, imaging the consequences for history if Roman legions had come up against Bantu cavalries mounted in rhinoceroses. We would probably now have far right Africans trying to justify their colonization and Africanization of Eurasia and carrying off millions of white West Europeans into slavery in Africa where their descendants were being treated as a social underclass, as proving the biological superiority of the black races and why the 'white lives matter' campaign is dangerous radical extremism aimed at overthrowing the God-given order (the god being some West African local god which featured in their origin myths). White sports people would be being taunted with monkey noises and thrown bananas while thanking the West African god for their sporting success.

And enlightened scientists such as the author of the following article would be campaigning for an end to the pervading black supremacist thinking in science and decrying the influence of a black evolutionary biologist who, 170 year ago wrote a book explaining why black men were the superior form of the species and why black culture was superior to the primitive cultures of the pale-skinned races.

The author is Rui Diogo, Associate Professor of Anatomy, Howard University. His article from The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.



Racist and sexist depictions of human evolution still permeate science, education and popular culture today

Human evolution is typically depicted with a progressive whitening of the skin, despite a lack of evidence to support it.


Rui Diogo, Howard University

Systemic racism and sexism have permeated civilization since the rise of agriculture, when people started living in one place for a long time. Early Western scientists, such as Aristotle in ancient Greece, were indoctrinated with the ethnocentric and misogynistic narratives that permeated their society. More than 2,000 years after Aristotle’s writings, English naturalist Charles Darwin also extrapolated the sexist and racist narratives he heard and read in his youth to the natural world.

Darwin presented his biased views as scientific facts, such as in his 1871 book “The Descent of Man,” where he described his belief that men are evolutionarily superior to women, Europeans superior to non-Europeans and hierarchical civilizations superior to small egalitarian societies. In that book, which continues to be studied in schools and natural history museums, he considered “the hideous ornaments and the equally hideous music admired by most savages” to be “not so highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, in birds,” and compared the appearance of Africans to the New World monkey Pithecia satanas.
Science isn’t immune to sexism and racism.
“The Descent of Man” was published during a moment of societal turmoil in continental Europe. In France, the working class Paris Commune took to the streets asking for radical social change, including the overturning of societal hierarchies. Darwin’s claims that the subjugation of the poor, non-Europeans and women was the natural result of evolutionary progress were music to the ears of the elites and those in power within academia. Science historian Janet Browne wrote that Darwin’s meteoric rise within Victorian society did not occur despite his racist and sexist writings but in great part because of them.

It is not coincidence that Darwin had a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, an honor emblematic of English power, and was publicly commemorated as a symbol of “English success in conquering nature and civilizing the globe during Victoria’s long reign.”

Despite the significant societal changes that have occurred in the last 150 years, sexist and racist narratives are still common in science, medicine and education. As a teacher and researcher at Howard University, I am interested in combining my main fields of study, biology and anthropology, to discuss broader societal issues. In research I recently published with my colleague Fatimah Jackson and three medical students at Howard University, we show how racist and sexist narratives are not a thing of the past: They are still present in scientific papers, textbooks, museums and educational materials.

From museums to scientific papers

One example of how biased narratives are still present in science today is the numerous depictions of human evolution as a linear trend from darker and more “primitive” human beings to more “evolved” ones with a lighter skin tone. Natural history museums, websites and UNESCO heritage sites have all shown this trend.

The fact that such depictions are not scientifically accurate does not discourage their continued circulation. Roughly 11% of people living today are “white,” or European descendants. Images showing a linear progression to whiteness do not accurately represent either human evolution or what living humans look like today, as a whole. Furthermore, there is no scientific evidence supporting a progressive skin whitening. Lighter skin pigmentation chiefly evolved within just a few groups that migrated to non-African regions with high or low latitudes, such as the northern regions of America, Europe and Asia.
Illustrations of human evolution tend to depict progressive skin whitening.
Sexist narratives also still permeate academia. For example, in a 2021 paper on a famous early human fossil found in the Sierra de Atapuerca archaeological site in Spain, researchers examined the canine teeth of the remains and found that it was actually that of a girl between 9 and 11 years old. It was previously believed that the fossil was a boy due to a popular 2002 book by one of the authors of that paper, paleoanthropologist José María Bermúdez de Castro. What is particularly telling is that the study authors recognized that there was no scientific reason for the fossil remains to have been designated as a male in the first place. The decision, they wrote, “arose randomly.”

But these choices are not truly “random.” Depictions of human evolution frequently only show men. In the few cases where women are depicted, they tend to be shown as passive mothers, not as active inventors, cave painters or food gatherers, despite available anthropological data showing that pre-historical women were all those things.

Another example of sexist narratives in science is how researchers continue to discuss the “puzzling” evolution of the female orgasm. Darwin constructed narratives about how women were evolutionarily “coy” and sexually passive, even though he acknowledged that females actively select their sexual partners in most mammalian species. As a Victorian, it was difficult for him to accept that women could play an active part in choosing a partner, so he argued that such roles only applied to women in early human evolution. According to Darwin, men later began to sexually select women.

Sexist narratives about women being more “coy” and “less sexual,” including the idea of the female orgasm as an evolutionary puzzle, are contradicted by a wide range of evidence. For instance, women are the ones who actually more frequently experience multiple orgasms as well as more complex, elaborate and intense orgasms on average, compared to men. Women are not biologically less sexual, but sexist stereotypes were accepted as scientific fact.

The vicious cycle of systemic racism and sexism

Educational materials, including textbooks and anatomical atlases used by science and medical students, play a crucial role in perpetuating biased narratives. For example, the 2017 edition of “Netter Atlas of Human Anatomy,” commonly used by medical students and clinical professionals, includes about 180 divs that show skin color. Of those, the vast majority show male individuals with white skin, and only two show individuals with “darker” skin. This perpetuates the depiction of white men as the anatomical prototype of the human species and fails to display the full anatomical diversity of people.
Textbooks and educational materials can perpetuate the biases of their creators in science and society.
Authors of teaching materials for children also replicate the biases in scientific publications, museums and textbooks. For example, the cover of a 2016 coloring book entitled “The Evolution of Living Things”“ shows human evolution as a linear trend from darker "primitive” creatures to a “civilized” Western man. Indoctrination comes full circle when the children using such books become scientists, journalists, museum curators, politicians, authors or illustrators.
One of the key characteristics of systemic racism and sexism is that it is unconsciously perpetuated by people who often don’t realize that the narratives and choices they make are biased. Academics can address long-standing racist, sexist and Western-centric biases by being both more alert and proactive in detecting and correcting these influences in their work. Allowing inaccurate narratives to continue to circulate in science, medicine, education and the media perpetuates not only these narratives in future generations, but also the discrimination, oppression and atrocities that have been justified by them in the past. The Conversation
Rui Diogo, Associate Professor of Anatomy, Howard University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

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Saturday 1 April 2023

Trumpanzee News - Success of The MAGA Cult's Self-Inflicted Genocide With COVID-19

Trumpanzee News

Success of The MAGA Cult's Self-Inflicted Genocide With COVID-19

Excess death gap widens between U.S. and Europe, study finds: U.S. has an increasingly high proportion of excess deaths compared to five European countries -- ScienceDaily

Figures published in PLOS a few days ago point to an astonishing success rate for the self-inflicted genocide campaign waged by the MAGA/Trumpanzee cult during the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2021.

Probably as a result of the antivaxx campaign and the evangelical Christian and Repugnican-led campaign against the measures to impede the spread of the virus and lower pressure on health services such as social distancing, prohibiting indoor gatherings and wearing face-masks, the 'excess deaths' gap between Europe and the USA grew even wider.

Wednesday 4 January 2023

Trumpanzee News - Trumpanzees CAN be Nicer People

MAGA insurrectionists
Trumpanzees resorting to violence because they lost the election.
Conspiracy Theorists Are Nicer After Thinking Things Through | Psychology Today

A characteristic of Trumpanzee cultists, is their almost complete dependence on conspiracy theories to sustain their patently absurd belief in Donald Trump as some sort of divinely inspired saviour sent by God to engage with Satanic figures running the 'Deep State'.

These Satanic figures are, of course, because the only important things that happen in the world, happen in America, Democrat politicians, scientists and billionaires such as Bill Gates, led by Hilary Clinton, Barak Obama and assorted cannibalistic paedophiles. The conspiracy Trump was fighting gets ever more lurid, the more preposterous it becomes.

The 'Paedophile Deep State' conspiracy of course involved all the election officials in states where Joe Biden won in 2020, because they helped 'steal' the election from the rightful winner, Donald Trump, and all the judges who refused to overturn the result on the 'spurious' grounds that Trump's advocates could not find any evidence to support their claim, other than Trump's claim that he won really.

Another aspect of this 'Paedophile Deep State' conspiracy is the belief that the COVID-19 pandemic was fake and a pretext for injecting people with mind-controlling vaccines developed by Bill Gates, or as an excuse to stop people going to church, or that wearing face coverings was an attempt at population control because people can't breathe properly with a face covering and die of asphyxia. Of course, government health officials like Anthony Fauci, America's leading epidemiologist, were part of the conspiracy and faked the statistics such as the case numbers and deaths.

The third aspect of Trumpanzeeism is the belief that demands by black people to be treated the same as white people by the police is a conspiracy by political extremists such as anti-fascists [sic], to deprive white Christians of their rightful position as the middle and upper class of a stratified society. A society in which the poor (and Black) only have themselves to blame, welfare is a scam whereby the white middle class is robbed through taxation to subsidise fecklessness and drug dependence, and health care should be preserved for those who can afford to pay for it, the way God intended, in White Christian America.

And we shouldn’t forget the notion that Mexicans are all drug-dealing criminals and rapists who want to destroy America.

But just holding whackadoodle beliefs is itself harmless. What is harmful is the antisocial behaviour that can come from holding them, such as discouraging people from getting vaccinated against a lethal virus, encouraging them to attend super-spreader events where social distancing and wearing face coverings were seen as a disloyal political statement, and such as trying to overthrow a democratic government in a violent insurrection.

Previous research has shown that holders of conspiracy theories are more likely to indulge in criminal activities and other anti-social behaviour and less likely]y to conform to prosocial norms, often regarding laws and social norms as part of the conspiracy.

But there is some hope that at least the more anti-social consequences of holding conspiracy theories, such as those adhered to by Trumpanzees, according to the results of an interesting study by four researchers at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, Tübingen, Germany, led by Lotte Plummerer, a PhD candidate.

As described in Psychology Today by Craig Harper Ph.D.:

Monday 19 December 2022

After 12 Years of Tory Neglect, Under-Funding and Political Hostility, The NHS Now Needs YOU

'It's like being in a warzone' – A&E nurses open up about the emotional cost of working on the NHS frontline
J-Type Beford 'Dreadnaught' ambulance from about 1975

As a background to the current industrial disputes in the UK NHS with nurses and ambulance staff striking or planning to strike in the next few days, this is a potted history of the Ambulance service, and particularly my role in it during in the 35 years from 1975 to 2010 when I finally retired.

On Easter Sunday, April 3, 1988, about an hour past what should have been the end of a 12 hour might shift, I was advising a young police constable about what he needed to do to secure the crime scene where a mother had, for no obvious reason, decided to strangle her 5 year-old son with his dressing gown cord, stab her 7 year-old daughter 21 times in the chest with a kitchen knife, stab herself, try to cut her own throat, then run half a mile across a field and drown herself in a nearby pond.

About 30 years ago, five days before Christmas on the last day of the school term, I found myself under a school bus with its back wheel parked on the chest of a 12 year-old boy. Under the bus with me were his mother and father who lived just along the road. What would you say to them? We waited together for the half hour it took for the local fire brigade to arrive and jack the bus up enough to pull the body from under the wheel.

In 1989, on a cold and frosty winter morning, I found myself in the back seat of a car which had gone under the front of a lorry, crushing both the driver’s legs and trapping them under the dashboard, pushed down by the weight of the lorry. The driver, a young woman of about 20 was on her way to start a new Job in Aylesbury. She was not familiar with the country road and lost control on a bend. Both vehicles were on the grass verge. To get to them, the fire brigade needed to remove a section of the hedge with a chainsaw. No-one thought to warn me and my patient of the noise that was about to start not three feet from us.

I had her on a drip and had set up a heart/pulse monitor and fitted a blood pressure cuff so I could monitor her condition. Trying to keep us both warm I had wrapped her and myself in blankets. It took the fire service about three quarters of an hour to pull the car out from under the lorry and remove the roof. My patient survived the ordeal and the orthopaedic team managed to save her legs..

These, and a thousand other similar jobs are dealth with every day by the crews of the UK Ambulance Services and most of the patients from them end up in the NHS being cared for by nurses and doctors backed up by an army of ancilliary staff, cleaners, porters, radiographers, physiotherapists, laboratory technicians, etc. All of these are now bearing the brunts of 12 years of Tory underfunding, continuous reorganization, unfilled vacancies and economic mismanagement and, for the last three years, a raging, life-threatening pandemic for which innadequate personal protection equipment was provided by chums of ministers handed tens of millions of our money to supply PPE that never materialised or, if it did, was unuseable, even being salvaged from the clinical waste of Turkish hospitals.

"Oh! Don't worry! You can keep the money anyway. Thanks for trying!"

Monday 14 November 2022

Decline of the Fundamentalists - How the 'Nones' are Taking Back US Politics for Democracy

Americans who aren't sure about God are a fast-growing force in politics – and they're typically even more politically active than white evangelicals
GSS study showing increase in American rious “Nones”
('Black Protestant' and 'Jewish' subsumed into 'Other faiths' to give 'Other affiliation'
'No religion' includes Atheists, Agnostics and spiritual but not affiliated to any religion).
With the raucous jabber of evangelicals drowning out other, quieter, more measured voices in American politics, a non-American like me could be forgiven for thinking they are the major force in US politics, and they have had some, hopefully short-term, successes such as getting Trump elected in 2016 and him then stuffing SCOTUS with right-wing Christian extremists who promptly overturned Roe vs Wade. But there are more measured and thoughtful voices also beginning to exert a moderating and humanitarian influence, especially in the Democratic Party. They are the growing number of 'Nones', or people with no religious affiliations.

Of course this include Atheists/Agnostics, but it also includes people for whom religion is a personal thing that doesn't require affiliation to any one organised religion, although studies have shown that 'None' tends to be a half-way house between religious and Atheist as the loss of group affiliation tends to free the individual to look dispassionately at the (lack of) evidence, free from peer-pressure, and draw the rational conclusion - there is no evidential reason for religious belief.

The evidence is that the 'Nones' could have been behind Biden's win in 2020, helping to secure swing states, since 1 in 5 Americans adults and more than 1 in 3 Democrat voters are now 'None', and since 'Nones' tend to be generally more informed, it would be surprising if they weren't having an effect on US politics.

In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency, Ryan Burge, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Eastern Illinois University, USA, gives his assessment of the impact the 'Nones' are now having on American politics. The original article can be read here:

Sunday 13 November 2022

The Trumpanzees are Losing it.

US midterms: America appears to have passed 'peak Trump'
Trumpanzee mid-term elections rally
This is beginning to look like the end times for Donald Trump and his Trumpanzee cult.

The mid-term elections which were supposed to deliver a 'red wave' of Repugnican candidates as Trumpanzees took control of both houses, failed to materialise and scarcely even resembled a dribble. It looks like the Democrats will retain control of the Senate and very many of the candidates publicly endorsed by Trump either lost or won by slim margins. To make matters worse for Trump personally, his arch rival for both the Repugnican choice for the 2024 presidential election and as leader of white right extremism, Ron DeSantis, won the gubernatorial race in Florida by a landslide, setting him up for a run at the presidency.

Thursday 10 November 2022

Creationism in Crisis - How Human Societies Evolved

The origins of human society are more complex than we thought
The Palaeolithic Age in India
Neolithic Skara Brea, Orkney, Scotland
An illustration of an Early Neolithic settlement
Artist’s impression - Palaeolithic hunters
I wrote recently about how the simplistic view of a linear progress for human evolution is wrong, because the reality of the fossil and DNA record, of which there is a plentiful supply, is that it was confused, as side branches partially diverged, then re-joined and species such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans interbreed both with one another with their cousin species, Homo sapiens, and a third, as yet unidentified, species known only from DNA, and a similar process of partial or complete divergence and remerging probably occurred in Africa before H. sapiens emerged into Eurasia to meet the descendants of earlier Hominin migrations.

This, of course, is exactly what we should expect from an understanding of evolution and how it works over a large range and diverse geography.

And now, it seems the simplistic model of human cultural evolution from 'savage', through hunter-gatherer, to pastoralist and settled agriculturalist may be wrong and the reality was as confused as that of our physical evolution. This really isn't surprising, as cultural development is just as much an evolutionary process as is physical evolution.

Creationists, who must subscribe to the Bronze Age mythology in the Bible and Qur'an and so shun learning and reason, will probably find this difficult to comprehend because, while the mythmakers appreciated that they needed stories to explain theirs and other animal's origins, and even the origin of Earth itself, they were ignorant of the sociology of human cultures, other than of language.

There is the idiotic attempt to explain the origin of language with the 'Tower of Babel' myth, but cultures were simply assumed to be the primitive warring Middle Eastern tribal cultures that much of the Old Testament concerns itself with, with no attempt to explain their origins. The mythmakers knew nothing else, so assumed human culture had always been as they found it, complete with misogyny, slavery, a hierarchy of priests and irascible and vindictive, brutal ruling despots, and religious rituals to appease gods who closely resembled those ruling despots, and simply set their tales in that culture.

The view of a linear progression of human cultural development is now being challenged however, with evidence that palaeolithic cultures were as diverse as palaeolithic people.

In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative commons license with reformatting for stylistic consistency, Vivek V. Venkataraman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada argues that we need to revise our understanding of the evolution of human culture, in today's political climate of increasing inequality, political polarization, and climate change to understand what cultures are possible in the future. The original article can be read here.

The origins of human society are more complex than we thought


During the Ice Age, hunter-gatherer societies built sedentary settlements.
Credit: Shutterstock

Vivek V. Venkataraman, University of Calgary

In many popular accounts of human prehistory, civilization emerged in a linear fashion. Our ancestors started as Paleolithic hunter-gatherers living in small, nomadic and egalitarian bands. Later, they discovered farming and domesticated animals for food and service.

Before long, they progressed to complex societies and the beginnings of the modern nation-state. Social hierarchies became more complex, leading to our current state of affairs.

“We are well and truly stuck and there is really no escape from the institutional cages we’ve made for ourselves,” writes historian Yuval Noah Harari in his bestselling Sapiens.

A new book — The Dawn of Everything by late anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow — challenges this narrative. Rather than being nomadic hunter-gatherers, they argue human societies during the Palaeolithic were, in fact, quite diverse.

Today, increasing inequality, polarized political systems and climate change threaten our very existence. We need a deeper historical perspective on what kind of political world shaped us, and what kinds are possible today.

Social flexibility

orange book cover with red text reading THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING A NEW HISTORY OF HUMANITY DAVID GRAEBER DAVID WENGROW
In ‘The Dawn of Everything,’ Graeber and Wengrow make the claim that Palaeolithic human societies were quite diverse.
Ice Age hunters in Siberia constructed large circular buildings from mammoth bones. At Göbekli Tepe, a 9,000 year old site in Turkey, hunter-gatherers hoisted megaliths to construct what may be the world’s “first human-built holy place.”

In Ukraine, 4,000 year-old cities show little evidence of hierarchy or centralized control. And in modern times, hunter-gatherers shift between hierarchy and equality, depending on the season.

To Graeber and Wengrow, these examples speak to the virtually unlimited social flexibility of humans, undermining Harari’s dark assessment about the possibility for social change in the modern world.

As an evolutionary anthropologist and hunter-gatherer specialist, I believe both accounts miss the mark about the course of human prehistory. To see why, it is important to understand how anthropologists today think about nomadic egalitarian bands in the scheme of social evolution.

Human social evolution

In the 19th-century, anthropologists like Lewis Henry Morgan categorized human social evolution into three stages: savagery, barbarism and civilization. These correspond to hunting and gathering, farming and urban life, respectively. These so-called “stage models” incorrectly view social evolution as a steady march of progress toward civilized life.

Scholars do not take stage models seriously today. There is little intellectual connection between stage models and modern evolutionary approaches toward studying hunter-gatherers.

Anthropologists developed the nomadic-egalitarian band model during a 1966 conference called Man the Hunter. According to this model, humans, prior to agriculture, lived in isolated nomadic bands of approximately 25 people and subsisted entirely on hunting and gathering.

Research since Man the Hunter has updated our understanding of hunter-gatherers.
illustration of primitive red figures on a rock background
Hunter-gatherer rock art paintings in the Vumba Mountain Range in Manica, Mozambique.
Credit: Shutterstock
Hunter-gatherers and prehistory

One assumption was that small bands consist of related individuals. In fact, band societies consist of mostly unrelated individuals. And anthropologists now know that hunter-gatherer bands are not closed social units. Rather, they maintain extensive social ties across space and time and sometimes assemble in large groups.

Hunter-gatherers are profoundly diverse in modern times, and they were in the past too. This diversity helps anthropologists understand how the environment shapes the scope of social expression in human societies.

Consider nomadic egalitarian hunter-gatherers like the !Kung in the Kalahari or the Hadza in Tanzania. Being nomadic means it is difficult to store food or accumulate much material wealth, making social relations relatively egalitarian. Group members have equal decision-making power and don’t hold power over others.

On the other hand, sedentary societies tend to have more pronounced levels of social inequality and leave material evidence such as monumental architecture, prestige goods and differential burial treatment.

When these markers are not present, anthropologists can reliably infer that humans were living more politically egalitarian lives.

Palaeolithic politics

Human societies have generally become larger-scale and more complex over time. Popular accounts typically implicate farming in kick-starting the path to “civilization” and inequality. But the shift to farming was not a single event or a simple linear process. There are many paths toward social complexity and inequality.

The Dawn of Everything, along with reviews in cultural evolution and evolutionary anthropology, suggests that complex societies with institutionalized inequality emerged far before the dawn of agriculture, perhaps as far back as the Middle Stone Age (50,000 to 280,000 years ago).

This is a tantalizing possibility. But there is reason to be skeptical.

Complexity on the coastline

Social complexity emerged among hunter-gatherer populations living in resource-rich areas like southern France and the Pacific Northwest Coast of the United States and Canada.

So rich were the salmon runs of the Pacific Northwest Coast, Indigenous peoples could sustain themselves on wild foods while living a sedentary life, even evolving complex hierarchies dependent on slave labour.

Similarly, complex societies could have arisen in the Palaeolithic along rich riverine systems or on coastlines — now submerged by sea level changes — with plentiful marine resources. But there is no unambiguous evidence for sedentary settlements where marine sources are used in the Middle Stone Age.

Collective hunting

Collective hunting is another pathway toward social complexity. In North America, hunters cooperated to trap pronghorn antelope, sheep, elk and caribou. At “buffalo jumps,” ancient Indigenous hunters drove bison over cliff sides by the hundreds. This feat likely required, and fed, several hundred people.
aerial photo of a cliff
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta was the site of a communal Indigenous hunting practice where bison were driven over a cliff.
Credit: V. Venkataraman, Author provided
But these examples represent seasonal events that did not lead to full-time sedentary life. Buffalo jumps occurred in the autumn, and success was probably sporadic. Most of the year these populations lived in dispersed bands.

Egalitarian origins

Anatomically modern humans have been around for roughly 300,000 years. There is little evidence of markers of sedentary lifestyles or institutionalized inequality going back more than 30,000 to 40,000 years.
That leaves a big gap. What kind of society did people live in for most of the history of our species?

There is still strong evidence that humans actually lived in nomadic egalitarian bands for much of that time. Complementing the archaeological evidence, genetic studies suggest that human population sizes in the Palaeolithic were quite low. And the Palaeolithic climate may have been too variable to permit long-term sedentary life, instead favouring nomadic foraging.

This does not mean that humans are naturally egalitarian. Like us, our ancestors faced complex politics and domineering individuals. Egalitarian social life needs to be maintained through active and coordinated effort.

From these origins, an astonishing variety of human societies emerged. Our politics today reflect a small and unusual slice of that diversity. Prehistory shows us that human political flexibility is far greater than we can imagine. The Conversation
Vivek V. Venkataraman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
Human culture has evolved as with other evolutionary process to suit it to particular environment conditions, and what we have today is the result, just as the genes we have today are the result of our physical evolution over time.

Religions are remnants of that cultural evolution and whilst they may had had some value in ensuring group cohesion and conformity, in modern, multicultural, multiethnic societys, they are merely divisive and destructive, just when we need to start to become more united and egalitarian if we are to survive the challenges ahead of us.

Sunday 23 October 2022

UK Political Pantomime - The Problem with UK Politics is the Conservative Party

Do not adjust your sets: with Truss gone, the UK is about to get yet another prime minister
Tory Party leadership contenders, 2022
Tory Party leadership contenders, 2022 (second try)
Since 2010, the major political issue facing the UK is the fact that the majority party, the Conservatives, is a divided party, at war with itself and bringing the entire country down with it, as the troglodyte reactionaries, yearning for the 'golden age' of 19th Century empire, instinctively oppose any moves to propel the UK into the 21st Century.

First we had the EU in/out referendum because David Cameron decided he was going to solve the problem of the Eurosceptics in his party, with an inept campaign built on the arrogant assumption that the electorate would vote to stay in the EU because Cameron said it was a good idea, not dreaming for one moment that the campaign by those Eurosceptics would be a new low in political populism.

Using the same lies and fake news tactics that got Trump elected, with one false promise after another and one dire warning after another, playing to the xenophobia of a people who had been subjected to about 20 years of anti-EU propaganda by the right-wing press, creating the perception of a country over-run by welfare-scrounging Eastern Europeans, living on benefits and free NHS healthcare while living in subsidised housing at the expense of the ‘real Brits’. The truth was that immigrants tend to work harder and pay more tax than the indigenous population, and essential services like the NHS and social care and the entire hospitality industry had become dependent on EU migrant labour.

There would allegedly be £380 million a week extra for the NHS by saving our contribution to the EU budget - a calculation that conveniently 'forgot' to take into account the money the EU gave back to the UK in the form of farm subsidies, regional development funds, the famous 'Thatcher' rebate, etc. Then there were the 100 million 'fanatical Moslem' Turks queuing to come to the UK and impose Sharia Law on us, when Turkey was admitted to the EU in a matter of weeks, despite the fact that Turkey was a long way from fulfilling the entry requirements and showed no sign of doing anything to meet them.

And of course there were the loony Brussels Bureaucrats legislating on straight bananas, banning British beer and renaming British sausages to offal tubes, because they hated us - all the imagination of a certain Boris Johnson who used to make up lurid populist stories to write as a hack journalist, rather than bothering with research and fact-checking.

Then we had the charade of Theresa May calling an election in a fit of reckless euphoria over opinion polls which forecast she would win a massive majority, only to conduct such an inept campaign that she lost the majority she already had and guaranteed the Brexit negotiations and necessary legislation would be almost impossible to complete by the exit deadline. The only reason for the election was that May didn't think her majority was large enough to be able to ignore the Eurosceptic faction in her own party. The result was an even bigger and bolder faction. And the hatred of a party that felt let down by a leaders whose job was to give them more power, not less.

That debacle was promptly followed by a government led by Boris Johnson who felt the rules didn't apply to him, as an over-privileged Old Etonian and Bullingdon Boy, even to the extent of lying to the Queen to get her to prorogue parliament to avoid a defeat in the Commons, only to have the Supreme Court rule the prorogation unlawful and invalid and order a recall of parliament.
The Bullingdon Club 1987
The Bullingdon Club, class of '87
David Cameron (top left, second along), Boris Johnson (bottom right, first along).

Johnson's victory at the subsequent election was fought on the slogan 'Get Brexit Done', which should more correctly have been 'Get Brexit Bodged' as the result in Northern Ireland has shown. An effective tariff barrier now runs down the Irish Sea with Northern Ireland on the EU side of it – something that the Eurosceptics in the Tory Party, led by Johnson, had declared unacceptable, but which suddenly became acceptable, to ‘Get Brexit Done’ at any price..

Now the previously unthinkable has happened and Sinn Fein is the largest party in Northern Ireland, so the Tory-supporting Unionists are refusing to form a power-sharing executive, with a Sinn Fein First Minister, and restore the devolved assembly. Northern Ireland, like Scotland, had voted 'Remain' in the referendum so the political pressure to reunite with the Republic is growing and making more sense politically and economically, as is the demand for Scottish independence. The result of Cameron's attempt to solve his party's internal problems could now be the break-up of the UK, leaving just little England with Wales as a discontented, alienated appendage, and Scotland re-joining the EU with tariff barriers and passport controls at the border, ending nearly 500 years of political union and an end to the United Kingdom as a single national entity.

And of course, Johnson’s inability to accept that the rules applied to him as well, resulted in Party Gate where he and his staff held boozy parties in 10 Downing Street while the rest of us dutifully obeyed the rules and stayed in our homes and avoided socialising during the pandemic lockdown. While the Queen sat alone in Westminster Abbey at the funeral of Prince Philip, Johnson and his clique partied the night away, leaving the cleaners to clear away the empty bottles and clean up the vomit the next morning. Johnson then casually misled parliament about his part in the parties claiming variously that there were no parties, that he wasn't present and anyway he didn’t realise it was a party because no-one told him it was, despite receiving a fixed penalty notice when the Metropolitan Police had investigated the evidence, to become the first UK PM with a criminal conviction.

Deliberately misleading parliament is a serious breach of the ministerial code and an abuse of power which should result in his suspension from the Commons if he is found guilty by the Commons Standards Committee whose report is due out soon.

Meanwhile chums of ministers were awarded billion-pound contracts to supply hospital and care home staff with PPE which often never materialised and, if it did, was frequently sub-standard and unusable, even old used gowns gleaned from foreign hospital waste bins, with blood still on them. And when the scandals were revealed, a decision was quietly taken at senior government level not to bother trying to recover the money their chums had defrauded the UK taxpayers out of. Not a sign of any concern for the health-care staff whose lives had been put at risk because of the lack of adequate PPE. They were later to be rewarded for their dedication with an effective pay cut with a below inflation increase in salaries. The Nasty Party has shown its contempt for the people whom decent Brits had aplauded from their doorsteps every Thursday during lock-down. (Compassion is for softies!)

Now, having rightly decided Boris Johnson was unfit for public office, and experimented with a swivel-eyed idealogue with no political nous and the charism of a text-reading robot, in the form of the astoundingly inept, Liz Truss, who promised them the biggest bribe if she won, the party is again in open civil war over the next leader - the fourth since Cameron scuttled off to spend more time with his money, and left others to clear up his mess. Unbelievably, there is a very real danger that, if the notoriously greedy and selfish, Thatcherite rank and file get a vote, they could vote Johnson back in, believing he will be best able to deliver to them the extra wealth to which they feel entitled! Having made three monumental mistakes in a row, let's give the mistake before last another go!

It's almost as though the Tory Party has become addicted to self-harm because it feels irrelevant and unloved - at least it's right about something - but is electing yet another leader really the only way it can recover any semblance of its former sense of self-importance?

And this bickering gaggle of self-serving shysters for whom compassion is for softies and morality is in the bottom line of the balance sheet, feels no shame in asking the British people to give it five more years of power at the forthcoming General Election, so it can continue to run the country into the ground to serve dog-eat-dog disaster capitalists.

The following articles by Ben Wellings, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Monash University, Australia, give his assessment of the current situation and the Tory Party's responsibility for the mess. They are both reprinted fromThe Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original articles can be read here, and here:

Do not adjust your sets: with Truss gone, the UK is about to get yet another prime minister

Credit: Andy Rain/EPA/AAP

Ben Wellings, Monash University British politics currently exists in a weird time warp. Like some bad special effects from an early episode of Dr Who, time and reality are bent and twisted – only this time it’s all sadly true.

This time warp operates in four main ways.

The first is that lots happens but nothing changes. Another prime minister has gone, but the same party, bereft of ideas, is still in office, clinging to power for its own sake.

It is a measure of the collapse of confidence among Conservative MPs that they fear electoral oblivion from what should be a quite unassailable majority of 71 seats in the current parliament.

The chaos of the management of the vote on fracking – a mischievous ploy by the opposition – should have been a comfortable backhander for the government. Instead, it precipitated the prime minister’s resignation. It’s as if the election victory of 2019 never happened, and we have gone back in time to when the Conservatives only had a slim majority.

The second way the time warp operates relates to the poverty of thinking throughout the party. The fact Boris Johnson is one of the favourites to return to Downing Street suggests how out of touch the grassroots members of the party are with the rest of the country.

The parliamentary party sees the grassroots members as a liability, and is keen to sideline them as much as possible in what will be a speed-dating version of a leadership contest over the coming week. Like Berthold Brecht said of the Communist Party of East Germany: the party needs to dissolve the people and elect a new one.

The third time warp is that the Tories now look like the “loony left” of the 1980s. Rather than being a party motivated by competently managing dull but important things like interest rates, it has morphed into an ideological fighting machine, tilting at windmills like the BBC and “critical race theory” (whatever that is).

Its ideological warriors sound like the inverse of beret-wearing, right-on Marxists from 1983: seeking to win an ideological war of position by capturing the commanding heights of cultural institutions like the National Trust. None of this helped the left in the 1980s. It is not helping the Conservatives now.

The fourth and last time warp returns us to an era before there was such a thing as the Conservative Party. During the 19th century, a group of men representing the interests of the landed classes and manufacturers eventually cohered into an organisation we would recognise as a political party. Time is now moving backwards, undoing this slow alchemy of centuries.

Much of the problem with British politics is indeed the Conservative Party. But it is right to ask if there is such a party in the singular anymore? The Conservative Party is riven with factions and overwhelming personal rivalries. It must be the worst place to work in Britain right now. But whatever the causes, it lacks a cohesiveness for even the most broad-church of political organisations.

Who will be the next Conservative leader? It’s slim pickings for a party bereft of ideas and waging ideological wars.

Credit: Jessica Taylor/AP/AAP
This will make choosing the new leader an impossible choice. Johnson is possible. He is a great campaigner, but that was back in 2019 before “partygate”. Rishi Sunak could run on an “I told you so” ticket but is a multi-millionaire, which would not go down well in the current context of the politics of cost of living. Penny Mordaunt has kept her nose clean during the Truss tenure, but lacks experience. Suella Braverman is the loudest ideological warrior and not popular among MPs or the British public, so will presumably win.

Finally, bending space as well as time, the United Kingdom has turned into “Britaly”: a Dr Moreau-like hybrid of Britain and Italy where the bond markets are in charge, growth is sluggish, and only one party is in government, although the personnel seem to change constantly.

This all might seem like an open goal for the opposition Labour Party, which after the election loss in 2019 had resigned itself to further decades of permanent opposition. But there is something to be lamented here. After the Republican Party in the USA, the Conservative Party is the oldest – and most successful – party in the world. Both parties have become riven with factions fighting what they see as existential ideological battles. The public in both countries suffers as a result.

It is time for the Conservative Party to have a cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down. If they were in charge of their time warping trajectory, a return to a time before the lunatics took over the asylum wouldn’t be a bad place to stop and reflect. The Conversation

Ben Wellings, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Monash University

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
In the next article, published just before Truss' resignation, Ben Wellings explains why the problem is the Conservative Party:

There’s something wrong with British politics. It’s called the Conservative Party

Credit: Frank Augstein/AP/AAP

Ben Wellings, Monash University

The current turmoil in British politics needs to be understood not just as a response to Liz Truss’s short time as prime minister, but as the result of problems within the governing Conservative Party since it came to power in 2010.

The Conservative party is a group of about 180,000 people who tend to be wealthier and older than the average UK citizen. It was this group, more than Truss’s fellow MPs, who chose her as leader of the Conservative Party. It was also this group that endorsed the policies she tried to impose on the country, causing outcry from the populace and the markets.

This method of selecting the leader of the party needs to be changed. The current method was designed when the Conservatives were last in opposition (1997-2010). This means it was unwittingly designed for changes of leader while out of government.

Choosing the leader of the Conservative Party is strictly speaking a matter for the Conservative Party. This is fine when in opposition. When in government, a change of leader means a change of prime minister. This narrow franchise weakens the legitimacy of whoever becomes the new prime minister among the wider UK electorate.

Too much emphasis on leaders

The Conservative Party has also given itself up to an over-emphasis on leaders. This is part of the spirit of the times. But it is also the case that the prime minister is no longer “first amongst equals”. Instead, he or she plays an increasingly important part in why people vote for a particular party.

The Conservatives supported Boris Johnson because he promised to “get Brexit done”. However, the 80-seat majority he won in 2019 gave the impression that the electorate was voting for a leader (Johnson) rather than a party (the Conservatives).

But if this new support was about Johnson and Brexit, rather than a more permanent switch to the Conservatives, it also meant it could not be counted on thereafter. This helps explain the urgency to oust Johnson and the poor reception for Truss’s policies.

Johnson’s new pro-Brexit supporters did not have the same political instincts as most Conservatives. This group of voters likes it when the government intervenes. They liked Johnson when he promised to spend money and address persistent inequalities between northern and southern England – inequalities exacerbated by the actions of Margaret Thatcher’s governments of the 1980s.

So, when he was replaced by Truss, who models herself on Thatcher, the support rapidly evaporated in the north, where memories of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike persist. In the leafy suburbs of the south, normally rock-solid Conservative voters have seen their mortgage payments and energy bills rise as a result of Truss’s “small state” ideology. They are not amused, and were already drifting away from the Tories as byelections held this year suggest.

The Conservative Party’s travails may be traced back to Boris Johnson and Brexit.
Credit: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA/AAP
No new ideas

Perhaps we should not expect a self-described conservative party to have many new ideas (after all, that’s the point). But the poverty of thinking among its leaders stands out. Brexit had a nostalgic element to it. The Truss-Kwasi Kwarteng mini-budget was more 1980s than Stranger Things. Even the markets couldn’t take the retro infatuation with trickle-down economics.

The Conservatives are stuck in a place where all their ideas are from Britain’s past. In the Conservative Party mindset, the past does not operate as a helpful guide for the future, but as a point of destination. It is a security blanket in the chaos of their own making.

They show no sign of learning from all of this. The instinct of new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is to return not to the 1980s, but to the 2010s. If you don’t like trickle-down economics, you can have austerity instead.

Austerity is where the current Conservative Party began its time in office back in 2010. Back then, David Cameron promised to address what he called “Broken Britain”. Little did electors realise this was more predictive than descriptive. Cuts to public services punished the worst off while the government claimed “we are all in this together” (in the way that everyone may be on an A380, but some people are in business class).

If that’s a no to 1980s trickle-down economics, how about some 2010s David Cameron-style austerity instead?

Credit: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP/AAP
Admittedly, it has been hard to predict the mood of British voters. Brexit, another product of internal Conservative division and poor party management, bent political loyalties among the electorate out of usual shape. It was this voter volatility that led Theresa May to call an election in 2017 and lost the Conservatives a healthy majority, even though its vote share went up. This was the greatest miscalculation in British politics since as far back as the previous year, when David Cameron lost the Brexit referendum.

All of these problems are in some ways internal to the Conservative Party. Voters angered by austerity turned to the right-wing populist party UKIP, forcing Cameron to call a referendum on EU membership. To try to quell the low politics of the militant pro-Brexit wing of the Conservative party, Cameron gambled with the high politics of the UK’s membership of the EU, and lost.

To realise all the illusive and illusionary opportunities that Brexit should in theory create, its most ardent supporters latched onto Johnson to bring down May. Johnson created the parliamentary deadlock of Brexit and then appeared to solve this self-inflicted wound with an election victory built on shifting sands.

However, he soon became embroiled in scandal after scandal, and his behaviour was finally too much even for the vulnerable MPs in “red wall” seats to stomach. Then, just when MPs thought it was safe to go back to their constituencies, Truss damaged already weakening support in the “blue wall” seats in southern England with the mini-budget: perhaps the most spectacular own-goal since Jamie Pollock scored against Manchester City in 1998.

Finally, most Conservatives now think Truss should resign. Yet in a final fling of nostalgia – and harking back to the glory days of the first half of 2022 – their favoured candidate to replace her is Boris Johnson.

The Conservatives have lost sight of where their interests and those of the country depart. By falling back on old certitudes that are no longer fit for purpose, they are behaving like a party that is already in opposition. The Conversation
Ben Wellings, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Monash University

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
The Conservative Party grass roots needs to learn to accept the fact that the "glory days" of the British Empire came to an end with Suez under Anthony Eden. The xenophobic Little England nationalists have taken 'their' country back and now don't know what to do with it.

It should come as no surprise that the Tory Party members will, given the chance, elect leaders that are unfit for public office, pursuing policies that benefit them but no-one else. After all, the interests of a parasite and its host rarely coincide.

The Conservative Party is the disease, not the cure.
Tory Party leadership contenders, 2022
Tory Party leadership contenders, 2022 (second try)
Since 2010, the major political issue facing the UK is the fact that the majority party, the Conservatives, is a divided party, at war with itself and bringing the entire country down with it, as the troglodite reactionaries, yearning for the 'golden age' of 19th Century empire, instinctively oppose any moves to propel the UK into the 21st Century.

First we had the EU in/out referendum because David Cameron decided he was going to solve the problem of the Eurosceptics in his party, with an inept campaign built on the arrogant assumption that the vote would be to remain in the EU because Cameron said it was a good idea, not dreaming for one moment that the campaign by those Eurosceptics would be a new low in democratic debate.

Using the same lies and fake news populist tactics that got Trump elected, with one false promise after another and one dire warning after another, playing to the xenophobia of a people who had been subjected to about 20 years of anti-EU propaganda by the right-wing press, creating the perception of a country over-run by welfare-scrounging Eastern Europeans, living on benefits and free NHS healthcare while living in subsidised housing. The truth was that immigrants tend to work harder and pay more tax than the indigenous population, and essential services like the NHS and social care had become dependent on EU migrant labour.

There would be £380 million a week extra for the NHS by saving our contribution to the EU budget - a calculation that conveniently 'forgot' to take into account the money the EU gave back to the UK in the form of farm subsidies, regional development funds, the famous 'Thatcher' rebate, etc. Then there were the 100 million fanatically Moslem Turks queuing to come to the UK and impose Sharia Law on us when Turkey was admitted to the EU in a matter of a few weeks, despite the fact that Turkey was a long way from fulfilling the entry requirements and showed no sign of doing anything to meet them.

And of course there were to loony Brussels Bureaucrats legislating on straight bananas, banning British beer and renaming British sausages to offal tubes - all the imagination of a certain Boris Johnson who used to make up lurid stories to write as a hack journalist, rather than bothering with research and fact-checking.

Then we had the charade of Theresa May calling an election in a fit of euphoria over opinion polls which looked like she would win a massive majority, only to conduct such an inept campaign that she lost the majority she already had and guaranteed the Brexit negotiations and necessary legislation would be almost impossible to complete by the exit deadline. The only reason for the election was that May didn't think her majority was large enough to be able to ignore the Eurosceptic faction in her own party. The result was an even bigger and bolder faction.

That debacle was promptly followed by a government led by Boris Johnson who felt the rules didn't apply to him, even to the extent of lying to the Queen to get her to prorogue parliament to avoid a defeat in the Commons, only to have the Supreme Court rule the prorogation unlawful and invalid and order a recall of parliament.

Johnson's victory at the subsequent election was fought on the slogan 'Get Brexit Done', which should more correctly have been 'Get Brexit Bodged' as the result in Northern Ireland has shown. An effective tariff barrier now runs down the Irish Sea with Northern Ireland on the EU side of it – something that the Eurosceptics in the Tory Party, led by Johnson, had declared unacceptable.

Now the previously unthinkable has happened and Sinn Fein are the largest party, so the Tory-supporting Unionists are refusing to form a power-sharing executive and restore the devolved assembly. Northern Ireland, like Scotland, had voted 'Remain' in the referendum so the political pressure to reunite with the Republic is growing and making more sense politically and economically, as is the demand for Scottish independence. The result of Cameron's attempt to solve his party's internal problems could now be the break-up of the UK, leaving just little England with Wales as a discontented, alienated appendage, and Scotland re-joining the EU with tariff barriers and passport controls at the border.

And of course, Johnson’s inability to accept that the rules applied to him as well, resulted in Party Gate where he and his staff held boozy parties in 10 Downing Street while the rest of us dutifully obeyed the rules and stayed in our homes and avoided socialising during the pandemic lockdown. While the Queen sat alone in Westminster Abbey at the funeral of Prince Philip, Johnson and his clique partied the night away, leaving the cleaners to clear away the bottles and clean up the vomit the next morning. Johnson then casually misled parliament about his part in the parties, despite receiving a fixed penalty notice when the Metropolitan Police had investigated the evidence. A breach of the ministerial code which should result in his suspension from Parliament if he is found guilty by the Commons Standards Committee whose report is due out soon.

Meanwhile chums of ministers were awarded billion-pound contracts to supply hospital and care home staff with PPE which never materialised and, if it did, was often sub-standard and unusable, even old used gowns gleaned from foreign hospital waste bins, with blood still on them. And when the scandals were revealed, a decision was taken at senior government level not to bother trying to recover the money their chums had defrauded the UK taxpayers out of. Not a sign of any concern for the health-care staff whose lives had been put at risk because of the lack of adequate PPE.

Now, having rightly decided Boris Johnson was unfit for public office, and experimented with a swivel-eyed idealogue with no political nous in the form of the astoundingly inept, Liz Truss, who promised them the biggest bribe if she won, the party is again in open civil war over the next leader - the fourth since Cameron scuttled off to spend more time with his money, and left others to clear up his mess. Unbelievably, there is a very real danger that, if the notoriously greedy and selfish, Thatcherite rank and file get a vote, they could vote Johnson back in, believing he will be the best able to deliver the extra wealth to which they feel entitled!

It's almost as though the Tory Party has become addicted to self-harm because it feels irrelevant and unloved - at least it's right about something!

And this bickering gaggle of self-serving shysters for whom compassion is for softies and morality is in the bottom line of the balance sheet, feels no shame in asking the British people to give it five more years of power at the forthcoming General Election, so it can continue to run the country into the ground to serve disaster capitalists.

The following articles by Ben Wellings, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Monash University, Australia, give his assessment of the current situation and the Tory Party's responsibility for the mess. They are both reprinted fromThe Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency, The original articles can be read here, and here:

Do not adjust your sets: with Truss gone, the UK is about to get yet another prime minister

Credit: Andy Rain/EPA/AAP

Ben Wellings, Monash University British politics currently exists in a weird time warp. Like some bad special effects from an early episode of Dr Who, time and reality are bent and twisted – only this time it’s all sadly true.

This time warp operates in four main ways.

The first is that lots happens but nothing changes. Another prime minister has gone, but the same party, bereft of ideas, is still in office, clinging to power for its own sake.

It is a measure of the collapse of confidence among Conservative MPs that they fear electoral oblivion from what should be a quite unassailable majority of 71 seats in the current parliament.

The chaos of the management of the vote on fracking – a mischievous ploy by the opposition – should have been a comfortable backhander for the government. Instead, it precipitated the prime minister’s resignation. It’s as if the election victory of 2019 never happened, and we have gone back in time to when the Conservatives only had a slim majority.

The second way the time warp operates relates to the poverty of thinking throughout the party. The fact Boris Johnson is one of the favourites to return to Downing Street suggests how out of touch the grassroots members of the party are with the rest of the country.

The parliamentary party sees the grassroots members as a liability, and is keen to sideline them as much as possible in what will be a speed-dating version of a leadership contest over the coming week. Like Berthold Brecht said of the Communist Party of East Germany: the party needs to dissolve the people and elect a new one.

The third time warp is that the Tories now look like the “loony left” of the 1980s. Rather than being a party motivated by competently managing dull but important things like interest rates, it has morphed into an ideological fighting machine, tilting at windmills like the BBC and “critical race theory” (whatever that is).

Its ideological warriors sound like the inverse of beret-wearing, right-on Marxists from 1983: seeking to win an ideological war of position by capturing the commanding heights of cultural institutions like the National Trust. None of this helped the left in the 1980s. It is not helping the Conservatives now.

The fourth and last time warp returns us to an era before there was such a thing as the Conservative Party. During the 19th century, a group of men representing the interests of the landed classes and manufacturers eventually cohered into an organisation we would recognise as a political party. Time is now moving backwards, undoing this slow alchemy of centuries.

Much of the problem with British politics is indeed the Conservative Party. But it is right to ask if there is such a party in the singular anymore? The Conservative Party is riven with factions and overwhelming personal rivalries. It must be the worst place to work in Britain right now. But whatever the causes, it lacks a cohesiveness for even the most broad-church of political organisations.

Who will be the next Conservative leader? It’s slim pickings for a party bereft of ideas and waging ideological wars.

Credit: Jessica Taylor/AP/AAP
This will make choosing the new leader an impossible choice. Johnson is possible. He is a great campaigner, but that was back in 2019 before “partygate”. Rishi Sunak could run on an “I told you so” ticket but is a multi-millionaire, which would not go down well in the current context of the politics of cost of living. Penny Mordaunt has kept her nose clean during the Truss tenure, but lacks experience. Suella Braverman is the loudest ideological warrior and not popular among MPs or the British public, so will presumably win.

Finally, bending space as well as time, the United Kingdom has turned into “Britaly”: a Dr Moreau-like hybrid of Britain and Italy where the bond markets are in charge, growth is sluggish, and only one party is in government, although the personnel seem to change constantly.

This all might seem like an open goal for the opposition Labour Party, which after the election loss in 2019 had resigned itself to further decades of permanent opposition. But there is something to be lamented here. After the Republican Party in the USA, the Conservative Party is the oldest – and most successful – party in the world. Both parties have become riven with factions fighting what they see as existential ideological battles. The public in both countries suffers as a result.

It is time for the Conservative Party to have a cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down. If they were in charge of their time warping trajectory, a return to a time before the lunatics took over the asylum wouldn’t be a bad place to stop and reflect. The Conversation

Ben Wellings, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Monash University

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
In the next article, published just before Truss' resignation, Ben Wellings explains why the problem is the Conservative Party:

There’s something wrong with British politics. It’s called the Conservative Party

Credit: Frank Augstein/AP/AAP

Ben Wellings, Monash University

The current turmoil in British politics needs to be understood not just as a response to Liz Truss’s short time as prime minister, but as the result of problems within the governing Conservative Party since it came to power in 2010.

The Conservative party is a group of about 180,000 people who tend to be wealthier and older than the average UK citizen. It was this group, more than Truss’s fellow MPs, who chose her as leader of the Conservative Party. It was also this group that endorsed the policies she tried to impose on the country, causing outcry from the populace and the markets.

This method of selecting the leader of the party needs to be changed. The current method was designed when the Conservatives were last in opposition (1997-2010). This means it was unwittingly designed for changes of leader while out of government.

Choosing the leader of the Conservative Party is strictly speaking a matter for the Conservative Party. This is fine when in opposition. When in government, a change of leader means a change of prime minister. This narrow franchise weakens the legitimacy of whoever becomes the new prime minister among the wider UK electorate.

Too much emphasis on leaders

The Conservative Party has also given itself up to an over-emphasis on leaders. This is part of the spirit of the times. But it is also the case that the prime minister is no longer “first amongst equals”. Instead, he or she plays an increasingly important part in why people vote for a particular party.

The Conservatives supported Boris Johnson because he promised to “get Brexit done”. However, the 80-seat majority he won in 2019 gave the impression that the electorate was voting for a leader (Johnson) rather than a party (the Conservatives).

But if this new support was about Johnson and Brexit, rather than a more permanent switch to the Conservatives, it also meant it could not be counted on thereafter. This helps explain the urgency to oust Johnson and the poor reception for Truss’s policies.

Johnson’s new pro-Brexit supporters did not have the same political instincts as most Conservatives. This group of voters likes it when the government intervenes. They liked Johnson when he promised to spend money and address persistent inequalities between northern and southern England – inequalities exacerbated by the actions of Margaret Thatcher’s governments of the 1980s.

So, when he was replaced by Truss, who models herself on Thatcher, the support rapidly evaporated in the north, where memories of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike persist. In the leafy suburbs of the south, normally rock-solid Conservative voters have seen their mortgage payments and energy bills rise as a result of Truss’s “small state” ideology. They are not amused, and were already drifting away from the Tories as byelections held this year suggest.

The Conservative Party’s travails may be traced back to Boris Johnson and Brexit.
Credit: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA/AAP
No new ideas

Perhaps we should not expect a self-described conservative party to have many new ideas (after all, that’s the point). But the poverty of thinking among its leaders stands out. Brexit had a nostalgic element to it. The Truss-Kwasi Kwarteng mini-budget was more 1980s than Stranger Things. Even the markets couldn’t take the retro infatuation with trickle-down economics.

The Conservatives are stuck in a place where all their ideas are from Britain’s past. In the Conservative Party mindset, the past does not operate as a helpful guide for the future, but as a point of destination. It is a security blanket in the chaos of their own making.

They show no sign of learning from all of this. The instinct of new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is to return not to the 1980s, but to the 2010s. If you don’t like trickle-down economics, you can have austerity instead.

Austerity is where the current Conservative Party began its time in office back in 2010. Back then, David Cameron promised to address what he called “Broken Britain”. Little did electors realise this was more predictive than descriptive. Cuts to public services punished the worst off while the government claimed “we are all in this together” (in the way that everyone may be on an A380, but some people are in business class).

If that’s a no to 1980s trickle-down economics, how about some 2010s David Cameron-style austerity instead?

Credit: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP/AAP
Admittedly, it has been hard to predict the mood of British voters. Brexit, another product of internal Conservative division and poor party management, bent political loyalties among the electorate out of usual shape. It was this voter volatility that led Theresa May to call an election in 2017 and lost the Conservatives a healthy majority, even though its vote share went up. This was the greatest miscalculation in British politics since as far back as the previous year, when David Cameron lost the Brexit referendum.

All of these problems are in some ways internal to the Conservative Party. Voters angered by austerity turned to the right-wing populist party UKIP, forcing Cameron to call a referendum on EU membership. To try to quell the low politics of the militant pro-Brexit wing of the Conservative party, Cameron gambled with the high politics of the UK’s membership of the EU, and lost.

To realise all the illusive and illusionary opportunities that Brexit should in theory create, its most ardent supporters latched onto Johnson to bring down May. Johnson created the parliamentary deadlock of Brexit and then appeared to solve this self-inflicted wound with an election victory built on shifting sands.

However, he soon became embroiled in scandal after scandal, and his behaviour was finally too much even for the vulnerable MPs in “red wall” seats to stomach. Then, just when MPs thought it was safe to go back to their constituencies, Truss damaged already weakening support in the “blue wall” seats in southern England with the mini-budget: perhaps the most spectacular own-goal since Jamie Pollock scored against Manchester City in 1998.

Finally, most Conservatives now think Truss should resign. Yet in a final fling of nostalgia – and harking back to the glory days of the first half of 2022 – their favoured candidate to replace her is Boris Johnson.

The Conservatives have lost sight of where their interests and those of the country depart. By falling back on old certitudes that are no longer fit for purpose, they are behaving like a party that is already in opposition. The Conversation
Ben Wellings, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Monash University

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
The Conservative Party grass roots needs to learn to accept the fact that the "glory days" of the British Empire came to an end with Suez under Anthony Eden. The xenophobic Little England nationalists have taken 'their' country back and now don't know what to do with it.

It should come as no surprise that the Tory Party members will, given the chance, elect leaders that are unfit for public office, pursuing policies that benefit them but no-one else. After all, the interests of a parasite and its host rarely coincide.

The Conservative Party is the disease, not the cure.
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