My message to Mark Zuckerberg today:
Stop telling us Facebook is a “platform for all ideas”. The evidence shows your algorithms censor conservative opinions. pic.twitter.com/HWLabaDcP9
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) May 22, 2018
May 23, 2018
“Red Ken” leaves the Labour Party
The former Lord Mayor of London resigned from the British Labour Party earlier this week:
Ken Livingstone resigned from the Labour Party yesterday. Allegations of anti-Semitism, following his comments about Hitler supporting Zionism, had, he said, become a distraction. Indeed, his ongoing membership of the party had become a particular problem for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, his friend and ally, whose leadership has been dogged by the suggestion that he is soft on left anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, Livingstone’s resignation is a cruel end to a career that saw him twice govern London as mayor, earn a reputation for radicalism, and play a decisive part in the development of the policy of ‘equal opportunities’ at work.
He was elected to represent Norwood on the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1973. He became head of the GLC in 1981, until it was abolished by the Conservative government in 1986. In 2000, when the Labour government created the Greater London Authority, and a new elected mayoral position, Livingstone was blocked by the party hierarchy from standing. Instead he ran as an independent and won. Later he was re-elected as a Labour candidate and held the position until he was defeated by Boris Johnson in 2008.
In the 1980s, Livingstone was one of the left-wingers who took control of London boroughs after Labour lost control of central government. Seeing that the old alliance of trade unions and Labour was no longer successful in rallying voters, Livingstone set about mobilising other constituencies. As had been trialled in Lambeth council by Ted Knight and Herman Ouseley, Livingstone set up a race-relations unit at the GLC, with a special remit to address discrimination in the recruitment of its workforce.
With similar policies extended to women’s employment, and later to the employment of lesbian and gay employees and those with disabilities, the GLC policy formed the archetype for the equal-opportunities policies that are today ubiquitous.
[…]
Livingstone has certainly given his opponents a lot of ammunition. He defends a view of Zionism as a collaboration with Nazism that loses sight of the difference between the two. He could claim that it is not his historical thesis, but one supported by such writers as Lenni Brenner. Still, more than a few people have noticed that Livingstone seems a bit stuck on this claim, in a way that suggests he might relish provoking Jewish activists and journalists.
Nevertheless, there is a lot of bitter resentment held by more moderate Labour supporters about the way that the left of the party has berated them over questions of racial justice over the years. And so the issue of anti-Semitism has become a means for some of them to get some payback by denouncing Livingstone’s supposed anti-Semitism.
Many of those denouncing Livingstone today are seeking to paint him – and, by connection, Corbyn’s team – as hopelessly anti-Semitic. In doing so they appear indifferent to the debt they owe to Livingstone for the development of equal-opportunities policies, whose very logic they are using to denounce an enemy for his improper expressions.
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Why The Netherlands Isn’t Under Water
Real Engineering
Published on 31 Oct 2017
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QotD: The threaten, bribe, bamboozle hypothesis
Ruling elites have three basic ways to keep the subject population under their thumb: threaten, bribe, and bamboozle. Everything they do is a variant of one of these basic actions. So, if the lush, misleading overgrowth were cut away, all government activities could be undertaken by only three departments: the Department of Cops and Soldiers; the Department of Santa Claus; and the Department of Delusion. However, if such a drastic, visible simplification were undertaken, the efficacy of the bamboozlement would be greatly diminished. It would be a public disservice to load more truth on the public than it can stand.
Much of what the government does ostensibly to carry out some valuable purpose (e.g., assisting the deserving poor, the sick, the struggling millionaire farmers, the domestic sellers facing allegedly unfair import competition, the sober college students, the elderly, people suffering ethnic or racial discrimination; protecting the nation against menacing foreigners and aliens from outer space; containing disastrous global warming; promoting a cleaner, healthier environment; undertaking or subsidizing scientific and technological research) amounts to specific forms of bribery, to buying people’s loyalties by giving them a portion of the loot the government acquires by means of its threats of enforcement and its bamboozlement in regard to the subjects’ “civic duty” to cough up taxes as the government stipulates. The state’s organizational complexity and its associated pragmatic and ideological veils prevent the general public from seeing what is really going on and then, perhaps, opposing it or becoming more recalcitrant in complying with government edicts and demands for tribute, thereby throwing sand in the state’s machinery of oppression and plunder.
As an exercise, you might test the TBB (threaten, bribe, bamboozle) hypothesis. See if you can find any significant government activity that does not fit under one or more of these three rubrics.
Robert Higgs, “The Three Basic Means by Which Ruling Elites Maintain Their Control”, The Beacon, 2016-09-07.
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