The State of Things

The Ripley Gambit is beginning to look like the better option, and little gives me hope.

Ordinarily, I'm given to optimism and, indeed, this little corner of the net is and has always been a testament to that optimism; the notion that we can think better, learn better, be better. That optimism has faded, as reflected by my output of late.

It's not like I don't have a lot to say, either, but I feel frankly like it's all a bit pointless, and the only question left for serious philosophical consideration - excepting Camus' excellent and suddenly extremely poignant pondering on suicide - is what the holy fuck happened to the contractually-mandated handbasket.

To put that into perspective, a quick shufty at the drafts section of this blog tells me that I have almost the entire content of the blog again in unfinished posts. A very summary precis tells me I have very large and information-rich offerings on topics like a more intuitive understanding of wave-particle duality, and another on quantum entanglement, and yet another on symmetry and conservation, as well as a promised piece that makes entropy in all its forms easier to grasp. I have a colossal piece on why recidivist vapourware salesman Elon Musk doesn't understand free speech or what motivates its protection, and on what George Orwell really thought about free speech (these fuckwits would have kittens if they understood any of this). There are a couple of instances of absolute germs of ideas, but most of those drafts are at most a nugget from completion, and none of them are anything other than my usual voluminous dissertations (yes, I've had comments about brevity; good luck with that) that the topics covered hereabouts warrant. Tens of thousands of words on all sorts of interesting topics, but I honestly can't find the motivation to finish any of them.

The world's gone to shit, and I see no sign that it's going to get better. We now live in a world in which the installation by fiat of an obscenely wealthy racist is vaunted in the popular press as a win for race relations. We live in a world in which misogyny - the oldest and most virulent prejudice in the world - is vaunted by people who self-identify as feminists. We live in a world in which two King's Counsels can utterly fail to parse correctly an unambiguous legal ruling and come away with the dumb notion that they won, a reality inversion only matched by their insistence that their support of biological determinism and societally-imposed gender norms represents feminism, when they're the absolute core of the patriarchy. We live in a society in which scientifically illiterate cretins can bleat that 'it's just basic science!' while not being able to articulate the most basic principles upon which science operates. 

We live in a world where every statement everybody makes is lensed by shit to look like something else and used to consign people to boxes. We live in a world where censorship is the primary tool of free speech advocates, where the dumbest dregs of the barrel can be elected, stand up in congress in front of a microphone and a bank of fucking cameras and complain about being censored. 

We live in a world in which a racist can be directly responsible for maltreatment of humans in a system in which her racist friends have held the reins for over a decade - and an unassailable supermajority for the last three years and it still be the fault of the minority. 

The Tories are done, and one might think that brings hope, but it doesn't, because I actually think Keir Starmer is worse than all of them. None of the openly bigoted Tories, including the racist Suella Braverman, the racist Rishi Sunak, the racist James Cleverly, the racist... fuck it, I could go on, but none of them give me the response that Starmer does. In all my life, I have never encountered anybody I distrust more than this man. People who understand trauma will recognise the phenomenon of hypervigilance. Keir Starmer is wrong. Just wrong, in every way, and that's before we get into his Tory political stance, because he is very definitely fully Manchurian. He's a confected candidate that shares none of the values of the core of the party membership.

He has one goal; get elected. 

That's a goal a lot of Labour members can, I'm sure, get behind. I held my nose and voted for Blair, despite it being obvious he couldn't think his way out of an open gate and that he was quite clearly Thatcher-lite. Starmer isn't even that. He's more Thatcher than Liz Truss. The propaganda tells us he has an exceptional human rights record. What he actually has is a blurbed-up but basically bare-minimum showing in international gatherings on the death penalty. In all other respects, his human rights record reflects his association with the CIA, which is to say it's all smoke and murderous mirrors. He's not remotely interested in human rights, nor does he have the intelligence or competence ot say anything intelligent about rights, which is why he can go on transphobe central Mumsnet and insist that children shouldn't be allowed to socially transition without the consent of their parents, a position that disagrees with long-standing legal precedent in the notion of Gillick competence, the Labour party's published position on equality and confidentiality AND medical advice.

The notion that children are the property of their parents is a strong theme in conservative politics, as are the racist and ableist dog-whistles of 'hard-working families' he lives so much.

Honestly, I wish I could vote Labour, but the content of the Forde report and other publicly-available evidence tells me this shower are no better. If I lived in a  constituency with a candidate I believed in, like Salford (Rebecca Long-Bailey is awesome), I could holdmy nose, but the racism was already doing it, and Starmer's ill-advised and wholly tone-deaf entry into the lore of transphobia - and he is transphobic - will go down in history.

Even my mother, who has been a Labour activist since the 70s, and has diligently and tirelessly canvassed and organised in every election, and stood and was elected as a Labour councillor for twenty years until her retirement only a few short years ago, has told me she's spoiling her vote, and that she feels disenfranchised.

There is no party to which I feel sufficiently closely aligned that I can vote. Racism, homophobia and transphobia are all absolute lines in the sand for me. I won't vote for a party that withdraws the whip for true statements, restores the whip to racists, takes no action on transphobia in its own MPs, stays silent about the domestic abuse perpetrated on one of its own MPs with the support and machinery of the party, dismisses the Forde report as irrelevant when the hierarchy of racism is STILL a matter of lived experience for many members, takes action against anti-Semitism by instituting the largest purge of Jews in Britain in modern political history, and where the leader is an obvious lying charlatan. 

Keir Starmer is wrong. Give me Trump, or Johnson. Fuck, I'd rather have Truss. At least you can work around the obvious and do positive things. Keir Starmer is dangerous, and frankly, if you vote for his party, you deserve him. He's a predator, and gives me the vibe I got from my earliest abusers. He's also incredibly thick. While I've never been partisan, I've always felt at least a little bit home around Labour. Not any more. I don't recognise this party of racist, factionalist hacks.  

So, I don't know if there will be future offerings. I'm trying to find motivation, and I still try to find that piece of me that thinks the human species is worth saving, but my current position is what I opened the post with. It's the only way to be sure.