There are seemingly no depths of absurdity to which modern political discourse will not descend. Each issue that presents its ugly visage is mislabelled and repackaged under some tangentially related guise.
When discussing house prices, for example, a bubbling cauldron of factors are forever mentioned - interest rates, not enough housebuilding, the rise of single person households - but the main stick of dynamite fizzing away is studiously ignored.
That stick, naturally, is immigration. Import a bajillion people from Bomalistan and you'll need at least half a squillion new homes (forgive me, Diane Abbott did the calculations for me).
If you are unable to see this basic fact, then you must be Very Smart: the kind of hyper-educated idiot that populates the modern world and whose reign has coincided with many of the most idiotic decisions ever made in our history.
A popular meme depicts an IQ bell curve. The seemingly 'obvious' opinion is held by both the lowest and highest IQs, whereas the normijority (normie + majority; my new coinage) holds the Very Clever opinion. It is, by definition, the type of stance you hear incessantly from politicians and second-rate journalists labouring for dinosauric outlets such as the BBC.
For these kinds of people, whose education has been premised upon the notion that 'everything must be questioned' – and therefore the obvious solution must be wrong (what brownie points can you get for stating the mere obvious, after all) – obvious cause and effect simply does not exist. A chin rub and a ‘well, ackshually…’ are their stock in trade.
When they see a murderer they don't see someone who needs a-hangin’, they see an underfunded youth centre and maybe a frustrated musician. When they hear of rape gangs up and down the country perpetrated by Pakistani Muslims, they can only blurt out that white paedophiles exist too, and that there are more of them (not per capita, I wager). When they see house prices rocket upward after the population grows by millions, they claim it must be the evil landlords or some failure of the market, instead of the result of untrammelled demand
Now, I do not contest that this line of enquiry is both useful and needed at times. The obvious answer will not always be the right one.
Yet, we enter dangerous waters when everyone starts thinking in this obfuscatory fashion. Call me old-fashioned but I don't believe most people have the raw brainpower to try and second guess everything without reaching some extraordinarily stupid conclusions. For proof, please see every idiotic modern notion, from 'tax will stimulate economic growth' to 'a man who cuts his todger off is a woman'.
For most this is a learned behaviour stemming from our useless education system, which itself lies downstream of the open sewer of progressive thinking. Interpretation, not facts, are forever championed in modern schooling, with the latter being fuddy-duddy and likely problematic (and probably invented by some dead white man!). The former – ephemeral and infinite – by contrast represent the highest peak of pseudointellectualism and gift their creator with a misplaced sense of achievement.
People have been willingly deconstructing their own minds and their realities because they have been told to do so is Very Clever.
The King of Very Clever – no doubt he’d hate the title as he’s a republican – must be Sir Keir Starmer.
Each of his utterances is seemingly calculated to be disastrously wrong and, simultaneously, ‘clever’ to the minds of, say, a sixth form debating chamber. This has been most feverishly displayed in the wake of the Southport murders.
The ensuing disorder was immediately labelled as 'far right'. Passions inflamed by the slaughter of innocents were disregarded as mere intolerant outbursts that needed to be quelled by the forceful (and generally infrequently seen) fist of justice. That there was a groundswell of outrage stemming from the crimes but whose long-term roots sat in the economic decline and social instability of most British towns was ignored.
As ever, the obvious was ignored.
More absurdly still is the subsequent assertion that the murdering scum's actions were - as opposed to 'mental health' or, more astutely, Islamist terrorism - due to the easy availability of knives on Amazon. A more obfuscatory line of argument one can hardly imagine. Hopefully Jeff Bezos will sue Sir Keir for these defamatory claims.
If I am unfortunate enough ever to receive a knife wound, Amazon - or Argos, or Tesco - will be far down the list of those I will apportion blame.
If I subsequently found out that, in fact, my assailant was of an exceedingly violent disposition (perhaps that would have already been established), and that he had been referred to and ignored by the government's flagship anti-radicalisation programme three times in a row - and, to boot, that his existence in the country is by virtue of invitation through a disastrously lax immigration policy - I may, in fact, start to blame the people actually to blame: the attacker, his ideological persuasion, and those that facilitated his presence in the country and abetted his savagery.
No doubt the apologists in my midst would remind me of the lack of access to after-school programmes and that white people can be terrorists too!
I listened recently to a podcast in which someone asked why the UK has no politicians of Donald Trump's calibre. The response made intuitive sense: because, in the UK, if you have any brains or ambition, politics is among the last professions (perhaps slightly ahead of toilet cleaning) into which you will pour your energies. The level of aggro involved is immense and the pay is derisory compared to any high-end job.
As such, the higher ranks of the IQ bell curve are removed. Even those who might be tempted out of civic mindedness will think twice to serve a country which professes to detest its institutions and its native population. We are left with the midwit normies, who are simply too Very Clever to be of any use.
But let us not be too pessimistic. As I noted recently, reality is coming back into fashion. Just look at the USA: only a few days in and Trump is making the kind of decisions that the smooth-brained establishment lackeys in Europe would deem ‘impossible’.
No doubt this ‘impossibility’ is partly a political tool to merely discount and discredit the courses of action whose necessity and urgency grow more acute by the day. But also, it reveals the small-minded pettiness of the brains that occupy our Establishment, whose horizons are utterly constrained by the need to remain Very Clever and to astutely deny reality.
Excellent article. Life in the UK now is like permanently living in one of those stress dreams where nothing makes sense and you can't make it make sense - you're just trapped in a loop of nonsense until you escape through waking.
In the wild west, an outlaw came into town he let all hell rip with his pistols, he robbed the bank and shot the sheriff, and Keir Starmer blames the horse he rode in on...