Dangerous territory

I hear Facebook and Youtube have banned far right nutcase Alex Jones from their platforms. Truth be told, I don’t  know what to make of it. Of course, it’s pretty clear that Jones has something wrong with him: watch any of his videos and you see a clearly unstable man becoming more and more agitated in his attempt to spread baseless conspiracy  theories. His act might almost be funny if what he was  saying wasn’t so fucked up. Yet for these web platforms to ban such reactionaries completely, as if they have judged that such views have no place in modern society, risks straying into some very dangerous territory.

The western world seems to be in a very dangerous place right now. Nazi thugs attacked a left-wing bookstore in Bloomsbury on Saturday, in an episode reminiscent of fascist Germany. The morons thought they got their way two years ago, but  now reality is setting in and the utter stupidity of both Trump and Brexit is becoming painfully clear, they are becoming angry. They are like children who can’t get their own way, denied the toys they thought they were promised; or like drunken football supporters who thought their team won, but is having that victory questioned. It’s now pretty clear that sooner or later, Trump will be impeached and Brexit will be cancelled – good sense always wins the day eventually. My only worry is, how the right-wing thugs will react.

One thought on “Dangerous territory

  1. Just a few minor corrections. Not all of Alex Jones’ stuff has been taken down, only the most extreme material. Trump’s impeachment is not certain by a long way, and Brexit is still on its way unless something really drastic happens. There are many scenarios for the way Brexit continues, and very few of them mean that we will have a status quo as of 2016.

    Most outcomes mean a short term severe downturn in the UK economy (accepted by everyone now) which will hurt mostly the majority of the not so well off people who voted to leave the EU in the first place. Its what happens after the initial problems that will determine which way opinion goes thereafter. And that’s where you head into very difficult territory, because who can know what will happen in five years time. If we’re deep in the doodoo, will it be because of Brexit, or will it be because of the big bad nasty EU, or some other global problem? Or will the economy improve (a little or a lot) in which case Brexit was a good idea all along.
    Because if/when we leave we will never know what would have happened one way or the other if we stayed in. We will never see the opportunities from working with the EU on fighting Russian influence on our elections, on forging stronger trade ties with China (because China will not worry too much about the UK on its own) on counteracting the German and French dominance of the rest of Europe, the scientific, medical, and space research of which we will no longer be a part. We will see the increase in food prices, the lower value of the pound, the shortage of doctors and staff in the NHS, the difficulty of finding people to work on farms, the lack of skilled tradesmen, etc etc. Brexiteers will blame it on all sorts of other reasons, but already we have problems with violent crime, social services for the elderly, staff shortages, low productivity, shops closing down everywhere, councils near to bankruptcy, over crowded underfunded schools, record credit card debt etc etc. We are so close to the edge financially its hard to overstate how bad it is. But we still march on to the potential disaster that will be caused by Brexit, because then we (whoever “we” means) will be in control of our own destiny/sovereignty..
    Just as we take over the wheel of a large bus (with the words £350 million for the NHS) as it approaches the edge of a cliff at 60 mph. Because at the bottom of the cliff the only way is up, the wealthy people with golden parachutes will be fine and in a position to exploit Brexit to their advantage, and the poor people on the bus may or may not be OK.
    We cant expect Corbyn to help because he has had a grudge against the EU since he was a student. His views go back to Socialist Worker (not quite communists) in the 70s where the EU was a mechanism to exploit working people, using low paid workers from Europe to undercut British workers. His views, much more carefully constructed nowadays, are based on a world view that only the hard left understand or agree with, and he is so lazy that we will never have a clear view on anything from him, except a lot (and I mean a lot) of verbiage that adds up to very little, and certainly nothing constructive in moving Labour into a position where they might actually win a strong majority. So we are stuck with the chaos that is the Tory party, under a leader who is fighting hard to avoid going over the cliff but is being dragged there by people like Rees Mogg, Gove, Jenkins, and Bojo, people who live in such a rarefied atmosphere that anything short of global world war will be perfectly fine financially whatever happens.


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