"Burning books that we don’t approve of is the only way to stop fascism."

"There has been much handwringing in the press lately over the progressive rewriting of Roald Dahl’s books, as though this were a bad thing. If I had my way, every copy of every book by every straight white male would be incinerated. Burning books that we don’t approve of is the only way to stop fascism....
    "[I]nstead of simply tinkering with children’s literature, why not just stop teaching children how to speak in the first place? .... To live in a truly free society, there must be limits on individual forms of verbal expression. So, if we never talk to children, or provide them with books, they will simply grow up without the capacity to express hateful ideas.
    "I can’t believe no one else has thought of this."

~ satirist Titania McGrath, from 'her' post 'Speaking English is Colonial Terrorism'

"In a successful economy one might have hoped that there would be many more really wealthy families, at least if that wealth had arisen from the creation and development of new businesses/products..."

"[T]he New Zealand economy has not exactly been a staggering success in recent decades. Setting the tax debate to one side for the moment, in a successful economy one might have hoped that there would be many more really wealthy families, at least if that wealth had arisen from the creation and development of new businesses/products....
    "[I]n the minister’s framing [of taxes levied on high-wealth individuals] there was no mention of the fact that New Zealand over the decades has had relatively low rates of investment (relative to OECD averages for countries with our sort of population growth) in land development, in building new houses, and in business investment more generally. What one aspires to have more of one generally should not seek to tax more heavily....
    "I have no problem with the notion that unrealised real capital gains add to the economic resources and future purchasing power of the owner ... But increases in asset values that simply keep pace with general inflation do not add to future real purchasing power and are in no meaningful economic sense ... economic income....
    "And in all this in a country where we systematically over-tax capital income already."

~ Michael Riddell, from his post 'Parker, taxation, and that IRD report'

Why it’s more important to “raise the ceiling” rather than the “floor”

Pic by Getty Images

"What does it mean to 'raise the ceiling' or the 'floor'? 

    "I just observed a lot of projects that set out to 'raise the floor.' Meaning: 'Gosh. "We" are fine, but "they" are not, and we need to go help them with our superior prosperity and understanding of their situation.' 

    "Many of those projects fail. For example, there were a lot of attempts to bring the internet to Africa by large and wealthy tech companies and American universities. I won't say they all had no effect, that's not true, but many of them were far short of successful. 

    "There were satellites, there were balloons, there were high altitude drones, there were mesh networks, laptops, that were pursued by all these companies -- and, by the way, by perfectly well-meaning, incredibly talented people who in some cases did see some success, but overall probably much less than they ever hoped. 

    "But if you go to Africa, there is internet now. And the way the internet got there is the technologies that we developed to raise the ceiling in the richest part of the world, which were cell phones and cell towers. 

    "In the movie 'Wall Street' from the 80s, he's got that gigantic brick cell phone. That thing cost like 10 grand at the time. That was a ceiling-raising technology. It eventually went down the learning curve and became cheap. And the cell towers and cell phones, eventually we've got now hundreds of millions or billions of them in Africa. It was sort of that initially ceiling raising technology and then the sort of force of capitalism that made it work in the end. It was not any Deus Ex Machina technology solution that was intended to kind of raise the floor. 

    "There's something about that that's not just an incidental example. But on my website, I say 'probably.' Because there are some examples where people set out to kind of raise the floor and say 'No-one should ever die of smallpox again.' 'No-one should ever die of guinea worm again.' And they succeed. 

    "I wouldn't want to discourage that from happening but, on balance, we have too many attempts to do that. They look good, feel good, sound good, and don't matter. And in some cases, they have the opposite of the effect they intend to."

~ Nat Friedman, transcribed from an interview with Dwarkesh Patel on the Lunar Society podcast [hat tip Jason Crawford]

 

"If everything is an existential threat and words are violence, real violence can seem more and more to be justified."

 

"The politicisation of science, the honing of the activists tools for cancellation of people they don’t like, and the involvement of government in collusion with big tech and media to control 'disinformation' ... may [well] alienate and attack so many people that their supporters become a minority....
    "It is indeed ironic [however] that those who claim to be squashing existential threats to democracy, have themselves caused a climate of growing acceptance of intimidation and threats, political violence and serious violations of ... law. If everything is an existential threat and words are violence, real violence can seem more and more to be justified."

~ David Young from his post 'How the Disinformation Industrial Complex is destroying trust in science' [hat tip Watts Up With That]

Do yourself a favour...

 

A good friend and drone enthusiast has just started an Instagram page, posting thereon some of the spectacular photos he takes, from his drone, of South Island landscapes. We sometimes joke that, in some places Down South you can almost post your camera at random and take a great shot -- all that is true, and these are taken from positions you've never seen before!

So do yourself (and him) a favour by heading over to Instagram and giving him a wee follow at iFlyNZ.

You'll both be the winners for it.

(And as an added bonus, you'll be able to find out from whence these great shots emanate...)

[All pics by iFlyNZ. Contact to republish.]

"PM Hipkins’ romanticisation is of a provincial New Zealand outlook and expectation. We can’t even call it cultural nationalism; rather it is provincial populism."

"[Prime Minister Chris] Hipkins’ romanticisation* is of a provincial New Zealand outlook and expectation. Hipkins’ ‘New Zealand’ is really one of the small town, small minded New Zealand of the 1950s. It’s food, focus and values that are increasingly out of step with most urban, educated, ambitious , entrepreneurial New Zealanders living in a multicultural society.
    "It’s as if the past 40 years never happened.
    "We can’t even call it cultural nationalism; rather it is provincial populism. Hipkins’ sausage roll scoffing small town social democracy is one many New Zealanders increasingly want to leave behind, figuratively, societally and increasingly, literally.
    "As such this provides a problematic correction to Muldoon’s claim [in the 1980s that 'NZers who leave for Australia raise the IQ of both countries.'] Those who choose to stay in this country for Hipkins’ reasons probably lower the IQ of New Zealand – while we lose the best and brightest, the entrepreneurial, the innovators, the trained and talented, the ambitious, to Australia."

~ Mike Grimshaw from his post 'Lowering the IQ of One Country'

* HIPKINS: "I’m absolutely confident that New Zealanders living and making a life in New Zealand want to continue to stay with the home of the All Blacks, the true home of the pavlova and the lamington. There’s plenty of reasons for them to stay back home in New Zealand.”

"To defeat aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war...."

"To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war....
    "If you want to abolish war, you must eliminate its causes. What is needed is to restrict government activities to the preservation of life, health, and private property, and thereby to safeguard the working of the market. Sovereignty must not be used for inflicting harm on anyone, whether citizen or foreigner....
    "Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly....
    "Only one thing can conquer war--that liberal attitude of mind which can see nothing in war but destruction and annihilation, and which can never wish to bring about a war, because it regards war as injurious even to the victors."

~ Ludwig Von Mises, composite quote from his books Human Action; Omnipotent Government; Nation, State, and Economy; and Theory of Money and Credit (collected here at the post 'Mises on War')

'Never, Never Fade Away'

'Never Fade Away,' by NZ musical legends Hello Sailor. 

"Age shall not wither them..."

(And remembering Graham and Dave.)

"Inequality has always accompanied prosperity." Eliminating that has always been accompanied by violence.

"[A]n increase in social inequality is not at all worthy of criticism if it is accompanied by a reduction in poverty. The Nobel Prize winner for economics Angus Deaton even goes so far as to argue that progress is always accompanied by inequality. The fruits of progress have rarely been equally distributed in history. Thus, between 1550 and 1750, the life expectancy of English ducal families was comparable to that of the general population, possibly even slightly lower. After 1750, the life expectancy of the aristocracy increased sharply compared to that of the general population, opening up a gap that was almost 20 years in 1850. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century and the gradual beginning of a social order that is today called capitalism or a market economy, life expectancy also increased for the general population from 40 years in 1850 to 45 in 1900 and almost 70 years in 1950. 'A better world makes for a world of differences; escapes make for inequality,' Deaton observes....
    "[W]hat would be the price of eliminating inequality? ... the renowned Stanford historian and scholar of ancient history Walter Scheidel ... concludes that: 'So far as we can tell, environments that were free from major violent shocks and their broader repercussions hardly ever witnessed major compressions of inequality.... we cannot simply close our eyes to what it took to accomplish this goal in the past. We need to ask whether great inequality has ever been alleviated without great violence.' Scheidel’s answer is a resounding no."

~ Rainer Zitelmann, from his new book In Defense of Capitalism. Quoted in David Gordon's post 'Equality Requires State Violence'

Marxian exploitation

"Karl Marx claimed that employers exploit workers because they do not give them the full exchange value of the goods and services they produce. However, Marx’s alternative also exploits workers. The formula 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,' necessitates Marxian exploitation. A worker whose ability exceeds his need receives less than he produces and is, by Marx’s own definition, exploited."

~ Richard Fulmer, from his post 'Condemning the Profit Motive'

IDENTITY POLITICS, Conclusion: It's Not a Right/Left Issue

 

Remember when you just took people as you found them? You didn't need to first check their tribe, their pronouns, their penis, or their "privilege." Alright, true, that wasn't all entirely universal -- but for a time there, it was at least the aim, wasn't it? 

That was, until today's identity politics took over.  Watching the increasing re-tribalisation of political life, it was hard to miss its arrival; any folk who did could hardly have missed its explosion in the latest TERF v Trans wars. It's real, and it's odious, and it's here. And it will only go away if you understand it, and fight back.

In today's conclusion of this brief series on the what and why and where and how of the identity politics movement and its origins and spread (first published back in 2019, remember), I remind you that the focus of the attack was (and still is) on our right to speak freely ... and it comes from both sides of the alleged political spectrum...

CONCLUSION: It's Not a Right/Left Issue

"Speaking is not only essential to the transmission of ideas; it is also essential

to the formation and validation of ideas. Speaking is essential to thinking."

~ Craig Biddle

As we’ve seen, this is not a right/left issue – it's bigger than that. Both “sides” of that notional spectrum collectivise people this way. And both sides should be damned for it. 

The right for example argue that race determines IQ and earning power; the left that class and gender determine one’s “privilege.” The right use this issue to oppose immigration because “white culture” is allegedly under threat; the left, to oppose “white privilege” in order to protect privilege’s alleged victims.

They disagree about what your particular collective might be, and what precisely this determines about your group, but they join hands in this deterministic embrace of collectivism. That your race determines your culture.

And both sides of the alleged political spectrum are united in opposing free speech: The left publicly celebrates “diversity,” except for diversity of opinion; while the right just as ostentatiously celebrates “western civilisation” by upholding values that civilisation has rightly damned. 

And the left trumpets “tolerance,” all the while being intolerant of those against tolerance; and at the same time the right celebrates their own intolerance, while seeking to ban those who are intolerant of them. 

And while the left wants to shut down and deplatform speakers on public streets and in public universities [and, most recently, in Albert Park], the right wants to regulate and control speech on Facebook, Twitter and on other private social media.[ii] 

The allegedly opposed political tribes are neither opposed nor rational, but on this point they agree fundamentally: the group above all. All they're really arguing about is: "Which group?"

Let me remind you of the three things missing here in all this: your own choices, your own values, your individuality, and your free speech. The values, in short that did build this civilisation, the values these barbarians have dropped. Defending civilisation should begin with embracing those values, and rejecting their tribalism. Because, remember this: "if the west resorts to tribalism to defend civilisation, then civilisation is already irredeemably lost."[iii]

If there is a "side," then it's this one: those on the side of reason, individualism and civilisation, and those against.

Because it's not about left versus right. Or our gang against your gang. That's a pathetic phone war. It's about individualism against collectivism -- especially, in these times, about individualism against this barnyard form of collectivism that has been building and incubating  on either side of the political spectrum, and is now very dangerously busting out again -- and in our own backyard.

The threat to civilisation is not "invaders" from elsewhere. It's our own awful ideas.

Arguing that race trumps reason -- that's wrong. And it leads to much worse.

Identifying collectives by means of race -- seeing conflict as inevitable and racially driven -- identifying ourselves or others by collectives, especially racial or religious or gender-based collectives -- is as deluded as it is deadly.

And it's dangerous whichever side of the alleged political spectrum from which it emerges.

The right's adoption of "identitarian" race-based politics in answer to the left's introduction of identity politics is wrong. Dangerously wrong. Irredeemably wrong. "Crushing the left" by adopting their tactics, strategies, and identity politics is not any kind of "winning" -- it's being captured whole. Killing people in the name of your racial identity is a throwback to a kind of barbarism that should have been, but still hasn't, been buried.

The politics of race is as vile when imposed by the left as it when spat out by the right; it has no place in civilisation.

Bad ideas can only be fought by better ideas. And that, right there, is the value to every one of us of free speech: in an environment of free and open exchange of ideas, we get to hear and think about this free exchange of ideas for ourselves; and the freer the contest, the more likely it is the better ideas that generally win. And then we all do.

It really needn't be a zero-sum conflict.

ENDS 

THIS IS THE FINAL PART of what has become a 7-part series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'
• Part 4: 'Politics + Poly-logic: Marx + Marcuse'
• Part 5: Intersectionality, or: 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'
• Part 6: The right adopts the left’s love child 

 

NOTES 

[ii] See for instance Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s ‘[Trump] White House Seeks Social Media Sob Stories From Conservative Snowflakes,’ Reason, 16 May, 2019.

[iii] Yaron Brook Show podcast, 'NZ Massacre & "White Genocide",' March 19 2019

 

"There’s an ominous recurring theme here: The very technologies we use to determine what’s trustworthy are the ones most under attack."

"The scarcest commodity in the world is trust. Nothing else comes close....
    "[But e]verybody is trying to kill it—criminals, technocrats, politicians, you name it. Not long ago, Disney was the only company selling a Fantasyland, but now that’s the ambition of every tech empire.
    "The trust crisis could hardly be more intense.
    "But it’s hidden from view because there’s so much information out there....
    "It has reached crisis proportions, and is getting worse. Compared to the trust deficit, all other shortages—eggs, toilet paper, vinyl albums—look modest in contrast....
    "Years ago, technology made things more trustworthy. You could believe something because it was validated by photos, videos, recordings, databases and other trusted sources of information.
    "Seeing was believing—but not anymore. Until very recently, if you doubted something, you could look it up in an encyclopedia or other book. But even these get changed retroactively nowadays....
    "There’s an ominous recurring theme here: The very technologies we use to determine what’s trustworthy are the ones most under attack.
    "Tell me what source you trust, and I’ll tell you why you’re a fool. As B.B. King once said: 'Nobody loves me but my mother—and she could be jivin' too.' ...
    "How hard is it to speak forthrightly and frankly? You would think that’s an easy thing to achieve. And maybe it was in the past, but not in the current moment."

~ Ted Gioia, from his post 'The Scarcest Thing in the World'

 

IDENTITY POLITICS, Part 6: The right adopts the left’s love child

 

As we've learned in earlier posts in this series, the left began and embraced the anti-reason collectivism of identity politics, using it as a lever by which to grasp power.  But as this post points out, the grotesqueries of tribalism work both ways.

Written soon after the Christchurch mosque murders, the post argues that the tribalism of identity politics has been picked up by what passes for the right of the political spectrum -- picked up, and turned into something savage and wholly odious ...

The right adopts the left’s love child

"The [Christchurch murderer] is ideologically on the same side as the 

Jihadists: he's moved by the idea that people are essentially parts of 

tribes, defined by ancestry & tradition, that are vying to 'replace' or 

repress one another. This idea must be opposed in all its forms." 

~ Greg Salmieri

IDENTITY POLITICS IS TRIBAL.  We are tribalised by others by gender, by race, by sexuality, or by “privilege.” (Or by all of the above!) Our “tribe” is how the progressive left now defines each of us and, if necessary silences us as well.

While this modern tribalism emerged on the left, it has now been fully embraced by the right – in another, but equally destructive form.

The left’s impugning of the white, the middle-class, the so-called privileged was bound to lead to a reaction from those being so labelled. But rather than argue against this flagrantly irrational collectivism on the basis of reason and of rational ethical standards, the reaction of some on the right has instead been to embrace it -- to embrace it on behalf of “whiteness” and “privilege.”

"Proud to be white!" say their T-shirts and bumper-stickers, unaware they're allowing their alleged adversaries to define them.

If the left, as a policy, had adopted so called “reverse racism,” then this new movement, calling themselves the Alt-Right, was willing to openly adopt its adverse: real and original racism. "If they're going to call us 'racists'," goes the (non) thinking, "then let's go balls deep."

That in a nutshell is what the Alt-Right represents: the politics of race, reversed. And with it we’re back to the very racism that the right originally opposed. Because the Republican Party, as representative of the Old Right, was formed before the US Civil War to explicitly oppose black slavery.  

“There can be no denial of rights on account of colour” declared Radical Republican leader Charles Sumner when eulogising Lincoln at his burial. This is how the "right" spoke then. Not now. Not any more. In recent times they've been slamming immigrants, spewing anti-semitism, talking about so-called "race realism," and scaremongering about so-called "white genocide." 

With this discussion of the Alt-Right, you might notice that we’re also right back to the gunman with whom we began this seven-part series. The “race realism” his tract upholds is a demand that the only realistic racial policy that governments should enforce is separatism. This is the so-called “replacement theory” for which he killed 51 people, the misbegotten notion that white people are being "replaced" by an “invasion” of more fertile coloured immigrants. After this and similarly-motivated massacres in El Paso and in Pittsburgh, Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill described these animals as “the armed wing of identity politics.”

They are armed. And they are barbarians. But this is identity politics taken to its logical conclusion.

And this -- all of this -- is very far from the reason, individualism and individual rights on which western civilisation was born and grew up (values which the right were once said to embrace). It is simply the violent flip side of the left’s own version of tribalism – a flipping of the intersectionalist’s diagram with the “strong” tribe on top, and very well armed.

If you can smell Nietzsche hovering around at this point, you would not be mistaken.

THE WORLD WOKE UP to this odious movement after an explicitly Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, just five years back. But it had been incubating for some time, and was emboldened by the populist revolt of Donald Trump’s election, and his pandering to the movement that had helped put him there. ("Very fine people on both sides," he famously said when asked.) 

But they had been around much, much longer than that. 

The two “sides” exposed themselves four or five years ago in an online “call to arms” over four women of colour in the US House of Representatives, including Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which was known as “The Squad.” Trump set off another small eruption heard around the world by tweeting that these women should “go home.” His supporters then began unthinkingly chanting “Send them home!” (oblivious to the fact that three of the four women were born in America). In response to this, many supporters of The Squad began reflexively chanting “Racist,” “Racist,” “Racist.” And on Twitter, almost immediately, two hashtags began trending: #IStandWithIlhan and #IStandWithPresTrump – the call going out for both sides to “pick a team.”

Such is the level to which public debate has descended in the United States of America.

OF COURSE, AS SOMEONE who thinks for themselves, one should choose neither “side.” As an independent thinker, one would recognise the implicit tribalism for what it is. As an individualist, you would reject the implicit demand from the drones that you pick a tribe and stick with it, no matter what.

The right's adoption of this tribalist "identitarian" race-based politics however, in answer to the left's introduction of identity politics is wrong. Dangerously wrong. Irredeemably wrong. "Crushing the left" by adopting their tactics, strategies, and identity politics is not any kind of "winning" -- it's being captured whole. Most particularly, killing people in the name of your racial identity is a throwback to a kind of barbarism that should have been, but still hasn't, been buried.

The politics of race is as vile when imposed by the left as it when spat out by the right; it has no place in civilisation.

For folk sympathetic to the Alt-Right, the Christchurch mosque murders should have been a wake-up call. For many of them, subscribing to Alt-Right identity politics however is simply their way of "owning the Libtards." Trolling them. They apparently don't realise that it's them being "owned" by the very irrational collectivism they (sometimes) claim to oppose, while releasing this barbarism from the crypt where it was deservedly buried.

They apparently don't realise that the opposite of Leftist identity politics is not the Alt-Right and its own politics of white supremacy. That these are both forms of the same thing: both forms of collectivism, both of which must be shunned. That the opposite of identity politics is not the creation of an identity politics of your own: the opposite of identity politics is individualism.

In the slogan of Quilliam's Maajid Nawaz (fig. 5, above), the controlling left and the Alt-Right must both be damned to hell[3] -- their shared identity politics condemned altogether as being the politics of the group, of the tribe, of the race. Racism, as Ayn Rand identified, being "the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism," a "barnyard" form of collectivism appropriate only to a mentality "that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men."[4]

Because, like every form of determinism, it removes the thing that makes us truly human: our ability to think and to choose.

AND POST-CHRISTCHURCH? The political reaction worldwide to the Christchurch shooting was as swift as it was self-destructive, ramping up threats to free speech with an across-the-board call for massive online censorship—social media platforms and governments "voluntarily" teaming up to ban "violent extremist content." As Reason’s Nick Gillespie wondered out loud: “What could possibly go wrong?”

What the New Zealand government did in the wake of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mass shooting, should disturb anyone who believes in free speech. The government went so far as to ban the manifesto of the shooter and video of the shooting… “possession of either the video or the manifesto by unauthorised individuals is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and NZ$50,000, while distribution can get you 14 years behind bars.” 

That's simply terrifying and positively dystopian. Do people really think that possessing a book or a text or a video means the owner is enslaved by it or even agrees with its messages? …

This sort of response makes me think of Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and revealed just how banal and childish many of their rituals, titles, and activities were in his 1954 blockbuster ‘I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan.’ The level of ridicule he brought to bear on the Klan helped destroy its credibility and power. Something similar happened to Scientology when its secret documents were made public via the internet in the early 1990s ... On a pragmatic level, the idea that hiding details and suppressing information about extremists will reduce their power seems wrong.

More fundamentally, though, it should be deeply worrying to anyone who believes in free expression that governments and corporations are openly working together to decide what is and is not acceptable speech…

Between threatened crackdowns by Republicans and Democrats and European Union bureaucrats and cave-ins by tech giants trying to preserve market positions, it's right to fear that the era of the open internet is almost certainly over.

Practitioners of politics exploit every opportunity, however grotesque. Post-Christchurch, their motive wasn't primarily empathy, it was "never let a good crisis go to waste." And the focus of their attack was (and still is) on our right to speak freely ... 

CONCLUDED IN PART 7: 'It's Not a Right/Left Issue'

PART 6 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'
• Part 4: 'Politics + Poly-logic: Marx + Marcuse'
• Part 5: Intersectionality, or: 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'

Mankind's real benefactors

"It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the [environmentalists at] the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground not [bureaucrats at] the Federal Aviation Administration.
    "It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of [people] by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing 'compassion' for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.”

~ Thomas Sowell, from his 2010 column 'The Real Public Service'

PART 5: Intersectionality, or: 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'

 

So if you've been reading this series, you now know what identity politics is, and why we've all been talking about gender and race and .... and .... getting so fucking tired of it all. But if you've been reading, now you know what caused all the nonsense, why it stinks so much, and why it's been causing so much bloody conflict. 

Here's something else about it that stinks. If you've been around academia or company's personally departments, you'll have heard the term "intersectionality." And if you've been listening in to people who want to make victims out of everybody, you'll have heard them shouting about it -- and shouting even louder about how they need to silence those who have so-called 'privilege.' 

So just what the hell is this "intersectional analysis"? And why should you care? Your second-favourite blogger is on the case...

Intersectionality: How some tribes are made more equal than others

"Identity politics amplifies the human proclivity for us-versus-

them thinking. It prepares students for battle, not for learning."

~ Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind

THE "MYSTERIOUS HIDDEN FORCES in society” mentioned in Part 4, those concealed agents of oppression that Marx + Marcuse allegedly uncovered, are what they say justifies the blatant suppression of free speech. To fight against this would-be censorship, you have to know how they generally go about it.

Marcuse’s hidden structure is given legs by the left’s tool of so-called “intersectionality.” In essence, it's an engine to divide and conquer -- to create in innocent folk the omnipresent feeling of victimhood, and in others the disarmingly guilty feeling of unearned privilege. Why would someone do this to others? Simple. Because they want power. If you can talk on behalf of some folk while you help silence others, then political power can be yours, you hope. It might be only a stone's throw away.

In his best-selling book The Coddling of the American Mind, American academic Jonathan Haidt traces the emergence of this influential tool to a 1989 essay by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law professor then at UCLA (and now at Columbia, where she directs the Center on Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies). In the essay, she argues that a black woman’s experience in America is more than just the sum of “the black experience” and “the female experience.” There are “layers” of structural oppression, she claims, that this would allegedly gloss over.

Crenshaw’s important insight [explains Haidt] was that you can’t just look at a few big “main effects” of discrimination; you have to look at interactions, or “intersections.” More generally, as explained in a recent book by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge: ‘Intersectionality as an analytic tool examines how power relations are intertwined and mutually constructing. Race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, ethnicity, nation, religion, and age are categories of analysis, terms that reference important social divisions. But they are also categories that gain meaning from power relations of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class exploitation.’[1]

These categories can be mapped on a diagram as a series of bipolar dimensions, as one Kathryn Pauly Morgan did in a famous diagram now taught in university classrooms around the western world. Every graduate from the last two decades in most disciplines has had this rammed down their impressionable young throats. The simplified diagram shown below shows only seven axes of victimhood; Morgan herself identifies fourteen!

In an essay describing her approach [says Haidt], Morgan explains that the centre point represents a particular individual living at the “intersection” of many dimensions of power and privilege; the person might be high or low on any of the axes. She defines her terms like this: “Privilege involves the power to dominate in systematic ways …. Oppression involves the lived, systematic experience of being dominated by virtue of one’s position on various particular axes.” Morgan draws on the writings of French philosopher Michel Foucault to argue that each of us occupies a point “on each of these axes (at a minimum) and that this point is simultaneously a locus of our agency, power, disempowerment, oppression, and resistance. The [endpoints] represent maximum privilege or extreme oppression with respect to a particular axis.”[2]

If this looks like a particularly lunatic version of a magazine quiz (“10 Questions to Reveal How You’ve Been Victimised By Reality” or "7 Questions to Expose Your Privilege") or a particularly disrespectful parlour game (just how insulted should, say, a non-white disabled female feel at being told they’re a victim of nature?) then you’d be right.[3] It is precisely what Washington Post journalist Michael Gerson once described as “the soft bigotry of low expectations,”[4] performed as a pseudo-scientific dance.

According to Morgan’s view however, any young, white, attractive, euro, anglophone who is a gentile, heterosexual, able-bodied, rich, credentialed, cis-gendered, fertile male is ipso facto an oppressor to some degree. Whatever they’ve done, or haven’t done themselves. [Shout this loud enough, and Marama Davidson will show up soon enough to applaud.]

Quite how you are responsible for someone else’s alleged infirmity is another matter never fully addressed: what nature has rent asunder in the poor, infertile, disabled, non-white, lesbian, politics will (somehow) be able to make whole again. And note that however much the politicians screw the scrum in favour of these alleged victims, they still remain victims by virtue of their underlying power differential. (So as the Hobson’s Pledge organisation has discovered, whatever happens in law to “redress the power imbalances” to favour minorities, middle-aged straight white males will always remain their oppressors.)

And it matters not at all how tolerant you yourself are; in this world of power-driven adjectives if any one of those privileged adjectives describes you (able-bodied, fertile, swinging a penis) then you are one of the oppressing class and, in the views of Marcuse and his followers and fellow travellers, people like you must be silenced as a matter of social justice. After all, “the end goal of a Marcusean revolution is not equality but a reversal of power.”

Marcuse offered this vision in 1965:

It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don’t have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise [i.e., the allegedly 'privileged'], and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth [i.e., the alleged victims of reality] presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.’[5]

There have been millions willing  and eager to undertake that suppression. Often violently.

NOW REMEMBER, THIS IS what your children are being taught on every campus.

Imagine an entire entering class of college freshmen whose orientation program includes training in the kind of "intersectional thinking" described above, along with training in spotting so-called micro-aggressions, [i..e, what we used to call an unintentional slight, but can now be "weaponised" by the would-be power-luster. More on this here and here.] By the end of their first week on campus, students have learned to score their own and others’ levels of privilege, to identify more distinct identity groups, and to see more differences between people. They have learned to interpret more words and social behaviors as acts of aggression. They have learned to associate aggression, domination, and oppression with privileged groups. They have learned to focus only on perceived impact and to ignore intent … [and they'll have forgotten what they went to university to learn, and have no time in the curriculum for it anyway.]

This combination of common-enemy identity politics and micro-aggression training [see Chapter 6] creates an environment highly conducive to the development of a “call-out culture,” in which students gain prestige for identifying small offences committed by members of their community, and then publicly “calling out” the offenders. One gets no points, no credit, for speaking privately and gently with an offender—in fact, that could be interpreted as colluding with the enemy.[6]

How will students fare who have been taught this bile? We don’t even need to guess, just observe:

Since “privilege” is defined as the “power to dominate” and to cause “oppression,” these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people below the line are good. This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of Us Versus Them directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Furthermore, there is no escaping the conclusion as to who the evil people are. The main axes of oppression usually point to one intersectional address: straight white males.

You've wondered why the "woke" can so easily label straight white folk as "Nazis"? Here's a clue right here. But even a non-straight can be in danger if they're part of the "power structure":

An illustration of this way of thinking happened at Brown University in November of 2015, when students stormed the president’s office and presented their list of demands to her and the provost (the chief academic officer, generally considered the second-highest post). At one point in the video of the confrontation, the provost, a white man, says, “Can we just have a conversation about—?” but he is interrupted by shouts of “No!” and students’ finger snaps. One protester offers this explanation for cutting him off: “The problem they are having is that heterosexual white males have always dominated the space.” The provost then points out that he himself is gay. The student stutters a bit but continues on, undeterred by the fact that Brown University was led by a woman and a gay man: “Well, homosexual … it doesn’t matter … white males are at the top of the hierarchy.”[7]

OBSERVE AGAIN THAT ALL the qualities chosen by the intersectionalists are, almost each and every one of them, something you have at birth, something about which you can do nothing, something which (in their own eyes) is considered to be a negative. There is not a single quality about which one can do anything, and almost none that have real existential import. In a very real sense, these identitarians are not just in revolt against reality, they are blind to genuine human values.

[T]he tribalists keep proclaiming that morality is an exclusively social phenomenon and that adherence to a tribe—any tribe—is the only way to keep men moral … [Yet their only moral] standard is “We’re good because it’s us.”[8]

For centuries, philosophers have identified morality as a science based on free will -- a field of study based on our ability to make choices, and to judge those choices against a given moral standard. But by this intellectual sleight of hand, your ability to make choices is considered irrelevant to whether your are good or bad. Your birth made you that way -- and the intersectional diagram will show you how.

The intersectionalists have chosen qualities, of course, that you cannot change -- and that, since only the un-privileged few who are victims are able to ever acquire -- are necessarily divisive. But one could just as easily, and with much more coherence, draw up a diagram of life-giving virtues which anyone (even the alleged victims) could choose; actions and behaviour that one could follow as a means to shake off their poor start in life, perhaps, and to pursue real, meaningful life-enhancing values – like those shown in Figure 4 below. But benevolent outcomes like individual growth, prosperity, success and happiness take individual effort, not group whinging – “his own happiness is man's only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it”[i] – and would hardly fuel the social unrest Marcuse and his followers are after. Indeed (if you recall) their system is designed to mitigate against these very things!

Happy, successful people don’t follow dictators. Victims do. And it is victims that these power-lusters hope to harvest.

Commenting on this phenomenon at its birth, many years ago, Ayn Rand observed that it marked an important transition in human affairs: the explicit emergence of what she called “the hatred of the good for being the good,” and the arrival on the scene of creatures dedicated only to destruction. She marked the 

virulent cases of hatred, masked as envy, for those who possess personal values or virtues: hatred for a man or woman because he or she is beautiful or intelligent or successful or honest or happy. In these cases, the creature has no desire and makes no effort to improve its appearance, to develop or use its intelligence, to struggle for success, to practice honesty, to be happy (nothing can make it happy). It knows that the disfigurement or mental collapse or the failure or the immorality or the misery of its victim would not endow it with his or her value. It does not desire the value: it desires the value’s destruction. (Emphasis in the original.) [9]

It represents not just a revolt against values, but against reality itself.

Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the “unfairness” of nature and volition, and to establish universal equality in fact—in defiance of facts. Since the Law of Identity[10] is impervious to human manipulation, it is the Law of Causality that they struggle to abrogate. Since personal attributes or virtues cannot be “redistributed,” they seek to deprive men of their consequences—of the rewards, the benefits, the achievements created by personal attributes and virtues.[11]

NOW, I BET MANY of you on the so-called "right' are reading all this while thinking smugly to yourself things like "those stupid Lefties," and  "at least I'm too smart to have fallen for all that crap." Well, tomorrow I'll explain to you why you're probably very wrong about that.

More on that tomorrow...

CONTINUED IN PART 6: 'The Right Adopts the Left's Love Child'

PART 3 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'
• Part 4: 'Politics + Poly-logic: Marx + Marcuse'

NOTES
[1] Haidt, Jonathan. The Coddling of the American Mind (pp. 67-68). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid (pp. 68-69). 

[3] As Hicks and others have noted, this form of measurement raises suffering and victimhood to a kind of moral high ground. It’s underlying ethic sets others above self, the weak above the strong, and elevates those who suffer most over those who avoid or diminish suffering. Indeed, it sets a group’s victim status as central to social virtue, and sets all rules in relation to their alleged suffering. The connection to so-called hate speech should be obvious. See on this the discussion between Yaron Brook, Onkhar Ghate and Greg Salmieri on Free Speech & Patreon, December 2018, https://www.blogtalkradio.com/yaronbrook/2018/12/23/yaron-brook-onkar-ghate-greg-salmieri-free-speech-patreon

[4] Gerson coined it for a 2002 George W. Bush speech to the NAACP, which concluded “No child in America should be segregated by low expectations, imprisoned by illiteracy, abandoned to frustration and the darkness of self-doubt."

[5] Haidt, Jonathan. The Coddling of the American Mind (p. 66). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[6] Ibid (p. 71).

[7] Ibid  (p. 70)

[8] Ayn Rand, ‘Selfishness Without a Self,’ collected in the book Philosophy: Who Needs it

[9] Ayn Rand, ‘The Age of Envy,’ (1971) collected in the book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 1971

[10] The ‘Law of Identity’ to which she refers is Aristotle’s philosophical law, not to be confused with the laws created by identity politics. It can be quickly summarised as: things are what they are.

[11] Ibid.

[i] Ayn Rand, on whose virtue schema this diagram is based, from ‘Galt’s Speech,’ collected in For the New Intellectual

"This year’s banking crisis was never going to be 2008 redux — more like 2008, the sequel...."

"This year’s banking crisis was never going to be 2008 redux — more like 2008, the sequel....
    "In one respect, the collapse of both Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse were isolated, one-off events that have now been contained.... Nevertheless, the runs on these banks are better seen as symptoms of an underlying disease that continues to fester.... the edge of a coming economic storm whipped up by a decade of geopolitical fragmentation and cheap money. Now, the overdue attempt to reverse this course has slowed the global economy, possibly to the point of recession.
    "Unlike the 2008 crash, this does not follow an era of prosperity, but rather 15 years of monetary chaos....
    "Central banks now find themselves trapped in a stop-start course of withdrawing money with interest-rate rises, and putting it back at each sign of stress ... And this hair-of-the-dog treatment may soften the hangover but only prolong the addiction of the financial system to cheap money."

~ John Rapley, from his post 'The Next Financial Crisis Will Get Ugly'

Beer

 

Cartoon by JesusAndMo.Net

But doesn't this describe *most* of today's MSM?

"Where, previously, journalists uncovered conspiracies, corruption, shady dealings or corporate malfeasance, the BBC’s new shiny role is to uncover opinions that don’t match its editorial lines and ensure they don’t get reported."

~ Jeffrey Peel

UPDATE:

Thought for the Day: 

"To build trust in the media, media must be trustworthy."

~ Paul Litterick 

From research by Dr Merja Myllylahti, ref: Paul Litterick

Child Poverty: "I'll take that bet."

"Still puzzled by the existence of child poverty some years after PM Ardern decided to abolish it? You might be interested to know that the question was addressed at the same time by a couple of Brits. More transparently; and – one imagines – with much the same success.
    "In fact, they went a bit further in ensuring the experiment would tangibly impact on the decision-makers themselves. They made a bet of it.
    "In the red corner, Jonathan Portes wagered £1000 that withdrawal of state benefits would propel the UK’s child poverty rate from a dreadful 31% to an appalling 41%. It doesn’t work that way, said Christopher Snowdon from the blue corner, accepting the bet.
    "Five years later, the measured UK child poverty rate was 29%. Snowdon had won."

~ Bob Edlin + Ian Templeton, from their post 'Blessed are the Poor in Jargon'

 

IDENTITY POLITICS (Part 4): Politics & Polylogism, Marx + Marcuse

So now you know what identity politics is, and something about what makes it stink: it stinks, because it says everyone who's born the same, or are grew up the same, thinks the same. So "stay in your lane"!

It suits the group-think merchants to promote this bullshit because (they hope) they can surf to political power on the group conflict it creates.

But how do they get away with it?

TODAY we burrow down into how this idiotic groupthink emerged into political life, and from where. And for that, we have to go all the way to Germany, and a bearded bloke in the British Museum Library, and their excuse for why the proletariat seems so generally happy with the fruits of capitalism, and wholly un-ready to revolt ...

Some Causes: Politics & Polylogism

"To the Frankfurt School, Freud offered a psychology admirably suited

to diagnosing the pathologies of capitalism… Thus Marcuse has an

explanation for the new generation of revolutionaries-in-training for

why capitalism … seems to be peaceful, tolerant, and progressive—when,

as every good socialist knows, it cannot really be—and for why the

workers are so disappointingly un-revolutionary. Capitalism does not merely 

oppress the masses existentially, it also represses them psychologically."

~ philosopher Stephen Hicks (Explaining Post-Modernism, pp 162-3)

THE POLITICAL OPPORTUNITIES REPRESENTED by encouraging group conflict were grasped early by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979).

Marcuse had a rare heritage. He was a German Marxist from the Frankfurt School, and also a student of Martin Heidegger, who embraced Nazism during the later war. In the rarefied atmosphere of Sixties America, Marcuse's writings on revolt and political power would make him “the father of the New Left.”

From Marx, Marcuse got the rejection of reason as a universal tool.  Like Marx, he promoted instead the notion of poly-logism – of so-called “multiple logics” – the idea that the conditions of one’s birth and upbringing “hard wire” your thinking and your very means of thought. 

You think we're all talking past each other? Of course, say Marcuse and Marx: because what's true in logic for your group is not true for mine.  They do mean this literally:

Marxian polylogism asserts that the logical structure of the mind is different with the members of various social classes. Racial polylogism differs from Marxian polylogism only in so far as it ascribes to each race a peculiar logical structure of mind and maintains that all members of a definite race, no matter what their class affiliation may be, are endowed with this peculiar logical structure. [Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action]

It wasn't born as a "socialist" idea however. It was embraced by both right and left: For the European left at this time, the defining feature was class; for the European right, it was race. For both, the important thing was the collective -- the only difference was how the collective was defined. 

This could seem amusing. For one example, David Ricardo’s 200-year-old Law of Comparative Advantage (which demonstrates the win-win proposition of free trade) was condemned by German Marxists because he was bourgeois, by German racists because he was a Jew – and by German Nationalists because he was English! So that was it: free trade was out, without any need at all to address any of Ricardo’s reasoning. Because by this anti-principle of multiple logics, reason is no longer universal, and each group has its own “logic” – precisely the formula for dissent, disagreement, and disruption that a Marcuse was after.

Marcuse was reinforced in this rejection of reason by Heidegger, who called it that “most stiff-necked adversary of thought" – an obstacle to be discarded. Marcuse was happy to throw it out: bathwater, baby, and all. 

HE THEN SET ABOUT about redressing the problem apparent to every Marxist no matter how blind: that the masses were simply failing to become impoverished under capitalism, and would therefore never rise up in revolt in the manner than Marx had long predicted. 

On this troublesome point, Marcuse found comfort in the ideas of Sigmund Freud. When Freud applied his worrisome psychoanalytics to social philosophy, he found himself arguing that civilisation is “an unstable, surface phenomenon based upon the repression of instinctual energies,” the forces of civilisation having evolved (according to Freud) “by incrementally suppressing instincts and forcing their expression into polite, orderly, and rational forms. Civilisation is thus an artificial construct overlaying a seething mass of irrational energies in the id.”[1]  To Marcuse and, the Frankfurt School, “Freud offered a psychology admirably suited to diagnosing the pathologies of capitalism.”[6]

It was not that the masses were not impoverished, argued Marcuse[3], who was blind to folk around him who were enjoying the fruits of rising post-war prosperity. It was simply, he argued, that individuals en masse were themselves blind to the so-called “structural impoverishment”that is allegedly implicit in the capital system,:“increasingly unaware that the apparently comfortable world they live in is a mask for an underlying realm of brutal conflict and competition.”[8] 

You didn't realise all that was seething underneath the surface of your weekly supermarket shop, did you.

Since the proletariat themselves however are blind to this brutal, if implicit, “structural” oppression -- if Joe Sixpack enjoying his relative peace and comfort to much to even see it -- then Mr Sixpack must have his eyes opened! Opened, insisted Marcuse, by overt political action from outside the proletariat. By a “great refusal.” It was the job of the insightful activist, he said, to "lift the veil" from victims’ eyes. Only then would they rise up and overthrow their structural oppressors. 

ALL THIS SOUNDS MAD enough. But first, he had to sell them a new idea of oppression. Instead of being happy in their own rising wealth and prosperity, they had to be taught to be unhappy in the alleged inequality of this blessings across the land -- to be upset that some others were pulling down more -- to be angry that the majority of the wealth, comfort, and power was in the hands of the "oppressors." To be angry about it, and to act.

One of the first "direct actions" Marcuse called for was to silence these alleged “oppressors.” (This was "cancel culture" back in the sixties.) Silencing the alleged oppressors on the grounds of this new view of equality, based upon so-called “power differentials.” Silenced as a matter of "social justice." In his widely influential 1965 essay titled “Repressive Tolerance,”

Marcuse argued that tolerance and free speech confer benefits on society only under special conditions that almost never exist: absolute equality. He believed that when power differentials between groups exist, tolerance only empowers the already powerful and makes it easier for them to dominate institutions like education, the media, and most channels of communication. Indiscriminate tolerance is “repressive,” he argued; it blocks the political agenda and suppresses the voices of the less powerful. If indiscriminate tolerance is unfair, then what is needed is a form of tolerance that discriminates. A truly “liberating tolerance,” claimed Marcuse, is one that favours the weak and restrains the strong. Who are the weak and the strong? For Marcuse, writing in 1965, the weak was the political left and the strong was the political right.[5]

He went on to argue that that the forces of the left must therefore use the arguments of “tolerance” against the powerful forces of intolerance allegedly commanded by the capitalist class. He therefore demanded 

the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought [sic] may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behaviour – thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives.[6]

Remember, this is what he called "repressive tolerance."

If we summarise, he is arguing that

“Because Western civilisation is inherently oppressive... speech should be free for those who oppose freedom, capitalism and the foundations of Western society, but not for those who defend them.”[7]

And in case the reader misses it, Marcuse makes the point explicit:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. [8]

This is a message impossible for any reader to miss. And they don’t.

[Remember some years ago for example when Chris Trotter was defending Helen Clark's illegal pledge-card spending as "acceptable corruption"? And then applauding her subsequent Electoral Finance Act “shutting down those with money [as] a necessary restriction on freedom of expression”?[10] That's where this comes from. Observe the widespread justification and even denial of the violence in Albert Park earlier this month? That's where it leads.] 

Following this script, those who dissent from the new orthodoxy are shouted down, denied platforms, forced into sensitivity re-education courses, forbidden from speaking, intimidated, mobbed, and even threatened with violence to get them to shut up. Consider again University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s call to her backers — “Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here!” [9] That was Marcuse’s message in action. So too is the shouting down of "TERFs" and "Nazis" by folk too ignorant to even know what Nazism means.

All is acceptable when it’s your Team’s corruption you're defending.

We see here too, slithering in from stage left, one of the most irrational ideas afloat on this whole sea of abject, anti-rational nonsense: the idea that is called intersectionality. It is this notion – justifying that some groups be made more unequal than others – that powers much of the tribalism shutting down modern debate.

MORE ON THAT TOMORROW.

CONTINUED IN PART 5: Intersectionality, or 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'

PART 3 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'

NOTES

[1] In his 1930 book Civilisation and Its Discontents
[2] Summaries of Freud and Marcuse are from Stephen Hicks’s Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition), (2013), pg 161-2.
[3] In his 1955 book Eros and Civilisation, making the obvious hat tip to Freud’s tome, and the 1964 best-seller One-Dimensional Man
[4] Ibid, pg. 162-163, summarising the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer
[5] Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind; How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, pg. 65
[6] Herbert Marcuse, ‘Repressive Tolerance,’ 1965
[7] Steve Simpson, ‘At the Heart of the Attacks on Free Speech, (2015), collected in Defending Free Speech, ed. Steve Simpson (2016)
[8] Ibid.
[9] Tom Palmer, ‘The Three Most Pressing Threats To Liberty Today,’ Cato Policy Report, December, 2016
[10] Editorial, NZ Herald, 18 December, 2017, which noted that “during the controversy over this bill. Illiberalism reigned. ‘People shouldn't be able to say that,’ was a common refrain… There was often an implied trade-off: that shutting down those with money was a necessary restriction on freedom of expression. It reeked of political commentator Chris Trotter's disgraceful conclusion a year ago that the unlawful spending on Labour's pledge card had been acceptable corruption.”