Hate!

Do you know what's wrong with the media at the moment? It's this pathetic stance they take where everything that happens has to have two sides. I half expect them, at some point in the future, to allow paedophiles the right to reply. We first saw this kind of bullshit during the pandemic, when the BBC allowed people to question everything about Covid - from the existence of the virus to the vaccinations. We've had it with climate change and on the other side of the coin we see less scrutiny of politicians - specifically right wing politicians. News dissemination isn't part of the entertainment industry but it often feels like it is.

In the last week, we've seen people being given air time on TV and radio expressing reasons and excuses as to why we're having riots across England and in parts of Northern Ireland and the argument seems to be that people are angry and they're looking for someone or something to take it out on. Is this one of the more pathetic excuses for rioting and looting that has ever been used or have I missed something?  I mean, these rioters are threatening the lives of not just non-white people but anyone who lives in the communities. They are destroying the infrastructure they are supposed to be protesting about. They are looting shops because, somehow, this is making the country better for their kids. 

These people are torching communities and it reminds me of the time when I used to work in Youth Justice. I'd work with car thieves and one of the first questions I'd ask them was why they did it. Usually I'd get some mealy response such as 'they have more than me' or a variation of. When I pointed out to 99% of these kids that actually the only cars they could steal were old models, usually driven by poor people who probably had fewer things than the thief, there was this weird thing going on behind their eyes; like the penny was dropping but they didn't dare acknowledge it. These arseholes trashing communities are trashing the places where they live. They are literally shitting in their beds and stamping in it.

When right wing wankers like Farage, Anderson, Tice and Tommy 'Ten Names' Robinson spout nonsense like the rioters have legitimate concerns, they are doing nothing but inciting more violence. These people do not have legitimate concerns and if you have to give them one iota of an excuse then that is what we're going to be looking at in the coming paragraphs. How these wankers became wankers because of people with privilege...

We've all seen the headlines of the Daily Mail, Daily Express, the Sun, the Telegraph and we've heard the shite that pours out of GB News - anti immigration headlines, anti-Muslim, anti-hope; headlines that pour petrol on the frustration of people who want something to blame for their shit lives. The drip drip drip tactics of white privileged right wing arseholes who do propaganda so well Goebbels would be proud. What about the BBC, or ITV or other media outlets that give voices to the likes of Farage or 30p Lee Anderson; why is that? Why, in a febrile volatile landscape, are media outlets giving voices to the people who are indirectly responsible for the problems that are happening at the moment? Why is that?

What about the 14 years of Tory rule we've suffered and are probably more responsible for this than anyone else? They brought us Brexit, which exposed the huge divides in the country that might not have dominated the landscape of the UK for the last eight years. They called migrants 'swarms', they harped on about 'the boats', they brought us the 'hostile environment'. They stopped processing immigrant applications so that instead of sorting these problems out they allowed backlogs of migrants needing to be housed somewhere therefore causing stress to the people with little brains. They stoked the fires of racism and then wandered around saying 'it wasn't me.'

There's this thing called cognitive dissonance - defined as: a term for the state of discomfort felt when two or more modes of thought contradict each other. This means, in layman's terms, as: if you believe something and it is proved that what you believe is not true, you refuse to accept the facts and continue to believe what you believe. If you've read my political blogs over the last eight years you will have seen a common theme throughout many of them - belief politics. That's not actual politics, it's essentially people who believe things that they've been told and therefore this is what they believe so it must be correct even if they're given proof that what they believe in is wrong. 

Brexit was a belief politics. Trump is belief politics. Illegal immigrants are belief politics. If you believe something then you cannot be swayed to believe in the facts. It is like some aspects of religion, usually, in my experience, Born Again Christians. Their belief is so strong they almost get emotionally unstable when someone questions their beliefs. The humorous but quite disturbing thing is the White Anglo Saxon Person's belief of what a Muslim is while simultaneously questioning the alleged extreme beliefs of a Muslim. 

The problem with cognitive dissonance is even if someone you trust and respect tells you that you're wrong, these people suddenly become the enemy and are believing the propaganda that's being fed to us by the establishment. Remember when people believed vaccines were full of things that they shouldn't be - microchips, animal or human foetuses, all kinds of stuff that would control you? Rather than listen to 100% of doctors and nurses, these people suggested that 100% of doctors and nurses were all being controlled by the establishment; the same doctors and nurses that we applauded during the pandemic and then condemned for wanting more money. people are simply fucking stupid and that is down to the governments we've had since the 1970s.

"We're losing control of our country. There's too many foreigners. There's not enough services because migrants are using them all the time." ... Let's look at that last sentence for a start; the one about there not being enough services due to people who aren't white. The reason there isn't enough public services - for everybody - has ZERO to do with migration and everything to do about governments cutting public sector funding. The reason you can't get a doctor is because the governments have run the NHS into the ground and people don't want to work there any more. Because there's no money for them. There are no buses because if bus routes don't make money they get cut. Trains are shit and expensive because private train operators are more interested in their profit than providing a service. Our bins don't get collected weekly because it's cost effective to do it every other week. We have no public services, especially in 2024, because of the Tories not because of an asylum seeker who is fleeing war or oppression. The reason you see so many brown people in A&E is because so many white people beat them up.

As for there being too many foreigners and we're 'sinking like the Titanic because there's too many of them.' 82% of the UK's population is white. If you include 3rd and 4th generation non-white people that figure goes up to 96%. That's NINETY-SIX PERCENT of the population who call themselves British, that's whether they're Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Greek Orthodox, Jedi or even - god forbid - atheists. So, the problem these rioters have isn't the 'illegal immigrants' - a term which is actually a misnomer because we don't give illegal immigrants anything because they're illegal. Illegal immigrants tend to be unknown to the authorities, because they're illegal. Look at it this way; we don't have a registry of burglars in this country, like we have a register of lawyers or even sex offenders.

So what we're dealing with is racists and dog whistling far right politicians using this racism to incite violence which bleeds [if you'll excuse the term] into ignorant peoples beliefs. The fact we have white Muslims gets forgotten about because what these wankers are looking at is the colour of your skin. Look at the riots in South Belfast; a protestant area - ie: Loyalists not republicans. These people doing the damage are targeting only non-white businesses; one of the businesses is run by Hindus, another is a Christian African; so this really has nothing to do with Islamophobia - which is a major problem - but to do with not liking brown people...

Consider this: when we had weekly rallies in London supporting Palestine, the Tory government called the protestors all manner of horrible things, from terrorist sympathisers to hate pushers. The Tory MPs who were making these colourful metaphors are absent in their condemnation of what has happened in the last week. Why is that?

Oh and while we're talking about it, let's not disregard Confirmation Bias, which is described as: "the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs." This is important. Possibly more important than cognitive dissonance because confirmation bias appeals to emotions whereas cognitive dissonance is about facts. This is what the internet and social media targets in people; people have been drip fed nasty propaganda for so long, they're looking for the one thing that confirms their beliefs - it doesn't matter if there are 99 things that don't confirm it, these people are looking for the one thing, from wherever or whoever it comes from, that makes their belief right. 

The other major problem with this kind of racist is there are no circumstances where a foreign person is entitled to anything, not tolerance, nothing, not a single penny, because the gammons will argue that any money an asylum seeker gets should have gone to pensioners or homeless veterans. This is a difficult thing to argue against, especially when you're dealing with confirmation bias. How do you argue against this? If you argued that literally ALL homeless veterans are homeless through choice and have mental health problems that aren't dealt with because we have piss poor mental health provision and that is because of public sector cutbacks and nothing to do with immigrants, your average gammon simply wouldn't believe you. They can moan about the government on a Monday and be cheerleaders for them on a Tuesday. We're dealing with fickle contrary arseholes.

So... how do we solve this problem? We'd need 50 years, because it's something that needs to be slowly taught and we need for kids to get it and these kids to gently re-educate their parents, to challenge their parents. Except that probably won't work, all you'll do there is cause more divisions in families.

The irony is if we got rid of every non-white person in the country, then it would become people who aren't Christians or Catholics; then it would become Christians only and then when everyone the gammons hate are driven out of the country (to who knows where) who would they start blaming then? The disabled? The unemployed (except there shouldn't be any because, you know, we've taken back control all of our jobs)? Single parents? Gays? Lesbians? Trans people? Short people? Really tall people? People with brown eyes? Where does it end for these people if their lives don't get better because of all the eradication of things they hate?

Maybe we need to have a kind of neo-authoritarian government who clamp down on the sources rather than the people who react? Maybe we need to slap gagging orders on the right wing newspapers; charge them with hate crimes if they target an individual or a religion? Maybe the BBC needs to stop door stepping Farage or 30p Lee? Maybe Farage needs to be NOT invited on Question Time? Maybe we need to stop giving this utter shit stick air? Maybe he needs to be investigated by the House of Commons for not being a proper representative MP? Maybe next time he goes to the USA to try and cosy up to his mad friend Trump we need to tell him he can't come back into the country because he's a terrorist? Maybe the likes of Yaxley-Lennon and Andrew Tate need stopping - full stop. But to do this we need wankers like Elon Musk to shut them down, not give them more space and endorse them by suggesting the UK is heading towards a civil war. We know governments are powerless to shut down the likes of Facebook or Xitter by legal means, so maybe it's time to shut these things down and stop people from getting them. Ban these kinds of social media from the UK... Except, we know that isn't going to happen, so we're not going to come up with methods to stop this shit from happening. 

Hate has its natural home on social media and social media isn't going to clamp down on it because the people who run them are above the law and are fucking barking mad mega-powerful nihilists. Maybe we need to boycott social media and go back to using the telephone and actually visiting friends; maybe we need to lose the FOMO feeling that made social media such an important part of peoples' lives. However, we won't do that, so we have to accept that we are, quite simply, doomed.