Why are (Some) Socialists and Far Right so quick to Assume they know what you're saying.

Holding Libertarian views puts you in quite a unique position where you seem to spend your time being attacked from all sides (granted I do bring it on by getting involved in some emotionally charged topics) so in the average day I tend to have debates with the Right on topics such as Gay Marriage, Immigration, Equality and so on, whilst at the same time having debates with the Left on The NHS, Austerity and EU Membership to name just a few.  Personally I love having debates like this and I see them as a great way to understand other people’s views as well as challenge the validity of my own held views.

This double attack has lead me to see even more similarities between socialists and far right debaters. I first blogged about how I consider the Far Right and the Left to be the same ideology a few years ago. The latest similarity I have noticed is in their common response to a challenging view which I call the Assume – Anger – Attack response. I should stress that I am not saying that this response is constant and there are occasionally some well reasoned and well articulated debates with Socialists however the level of AAA responses seems to me to be massively higher in the Left and Far Right than in any other group I regularly debate with (Although Extreme Atheists come close) Essentially the AAA response goes along the lines of 

1)      Assume I understand what you are saying, allowing my own bias to cloud my judgement.

2)      Get Angry about what I assume you are saying, this prevents logic from entering the debate.

3)      Attack, Attack, Attack – I have assumed you are bad so must now attack first.

As an example, recently I commented on a facebook post, now I should say up front that I was almost definitely in the wrong as I hadn’t quite understood what the original post was about – To be honest it was something that was so far from my view of the world that it never really occurred to me. One of my more left leaning facebook friends then put on a comment that attacked me, accused me of taking an opinion that was actually at odds to my own and stated that my views were actually dangerous. I was obviously confused (This was after all completely at odds with what I was thinking.) so I queried it and was again met with more assumptions about what I was saying – Assumptions based on the bias of the commenter and quite likely the incorrect assumption that I hold Right Wing social views – I responded with trying to clarify what I had meant and for the first time it was pointed out that my view wasn’t aligned to the original post, it went on for a few more comments until I eventually realised what he thought I was saying and I confirmed that I must have misunderstood. A long conversation based solely on the fact that he had followed Assume – Anger – Attack rather than a model that seeks to understand the other side before responding.  I call this the EEE model, Explore – Empathise – Exchange, based solely on the fact that I wanted three words that started with the same letter.

1)      Explore, Does the other person see the world the same as you.

2)      Empathise, Is there an emotional reason they took this view, why do they feel this way.

3)      Exchange, Now that you understand where they are coming from you can exchange your ideas.

Maybe if we all followed this model we could get a lot more understanding and a little less confrontation.

The Left Wing Immigration - Unemployment Paradox

In a conversation with a left leaning friend of mine I raised the idea that two main left ideas may well be incompatible.

Basically we were discussing unemployment and particularly his belief that most people who were unemployed wanted a job but that there were simply not enough jobs available for them - and therefore that Labour's new jobs for kids policy is set to magically solve unemployment. This led me to question another conversation we had at an earlier date that immigration is not detrimental to the UK, particularly the lower paid sections of the country.

My argument went that if as he claimed the majority of people that are unemployed want to work and are therefore unable to work as there are no jobs available then it stands to reason that one contributing factor is immigration, in fact with unemployment standing at 7.1% and foreign born (Employable) residents of the UK standing at 11.5% it necessarily follows that unemployment would be solved if it wasn't for immigration.

However if Immigration isn't an issue and the immigrants are coming here and doing jobs that nobody else wants then it necessarily follows that the unemployed are at least partly unemployed by choice. It should be a case that it is always easier to hire local staff over foreign staff as they have the language, cultural and society awareness that will aid in training and working life. 

RIP Bob Crow

Bob Crow 1961 - 2014

Looking through the news headlines this morning my I read "RMT Union Leader Bob Crow..." and immediately I thought 'Oh great what now.' I clicked on the link ready to get wound up by whatever Bob was going to be complaining about this time. As long as I have had an interest in politics I have had a dislike for Bob Crow, His complaints often seemed very self serving and trivial and his view of strike chaos being his ultimate symbol of success I always found abhorrent. However when I read that the final word of the headline was "..Dies" I actually found myself sitting in a mild state of shock. As tends to be the modern way I immediately went onto Twitter to try and cage the reaction of my fellow man and most seemed to be in agreement - there were a few distasteful comments, as there always are unfortunately, but the general view was altogether very respectful - Which is how I feel it should be. As much as I disliked pretty much everything about Bob Crow's Politics I still appreciate that he is a human being with family and friends who are in mourning.

When all of the nasty negative attacks were circulating after the death of Margaret Thatcher I did have a conversation with a "leftie" friend of mine in which I said. "How would you like it if everyone acted like this if Bob Crow died." Ironically I picked Bob Crow as I reasoned that despite being a Union Boss rather than a publicly elected official he has probably been the most important and gutsy Left wing politician since Gordon Brown sneaked away. Whatever your feelings on the politics of Bob Crow you can not say that he has had no effect and whilst I personally will not miss him from our political landscape I am sure that he will be greatly missed and I feel slightly sorry for whoever succeeds him as RMT Secretary as they will have very big shoes to feel - I do worry that in order to try and make a name for themselves they may over reach early on so I would expect some interesting times ahead for the London Underground.




 

Benefits Street - Propaganda or Real Life

There is a great deal of debate going on about Benefits Street and what the show is trying to show. Channel 4 say it is a "fair and balanced observational documentary". whilst commentators on the left claim it is about Demonizing those claiming Benefits.

Now I hadn't planned on having a view on this as I have simply never seen the show and so don't know what the fuss is about. but I have read a great deal of the opposition about it and it appears to me to break down along the lines.

1) Benefit Claimants are not like this

From the things I have read about being shown, then I have to say that SOME are, in my time as a local Councillor and even more so simply from my time living in a deprived neighborhood I have heard nothing about the residents that I find shocking. Whilst I would never say that everyone on Benefits is "Playing" the system or "up to no good" I have met enough of them to know it isn't an isolated occurrence.

2) All Residents of James Turner Street are crooks.

The first I heard about the show stated that the street had 90% claimant rate, I assume this would have been challenged if it wasn't true so assuming this is right they are still saying that 10% do not receive any benefits. Also to argue that most people on Benefits are not unemployed (Including Pensioners and Low Paid) is fine but is there evidence that people claiming benefits were purposely ignored for the show? Maybe there is but I haven't seen it.

3) It tries to show that ALL benefit claimants are crooks.

One thing I have never heard claimed is that Benefit Street is a typical representation of ALL claimants and if anyone did (other than a few mupwits on twitter) I would refute that, as just as I have experienced many people the likes of which seem to be represented on the show, I have met many who are simply trying to do the best with the situation they are in, and it is these people who should feel the most anger to the people featured as it is not the TV company who make people on Benefits look bad, it is the people on Benefits who act badly.

4) People were mislead to appear

I have heard this many times (Although never with a direct quote) but from what I understand the name of the show and the focus on benefits was known to everyone who was filmed. Even if we assume that the premise of the show was kept secret then I still don't think that the film company would be responsible as surely all they did was point a camera at the people, they didn't make them go out and steal (And if they did the person being filmed should have said no, after all if they asked them to jump of a bridge would they?)

So whilst I think that this show sounds like gross examples of the Benefit system for the Left Wing Commentators to pretend it doesn't exist explains why they never tried to get a handle on the issue, personally I think this is a lot more to do with the fact that all the Champagne and Idealism Socialists are angry because their argument of 100% or benefit claimants belonging to the Noble Poor doesn't stand up to scrutiny of placing SOME of them in front of the camera, at the end of the day the Daily Mail could try and Demonize the Poor all day long but it will never be as efficient as letting the people who are taking advantage of the system Demonize themselves.

FINAL NOTE - I just wanted to stress one last time, before the hate mail starts coming in. The views here are based SOLELY on MY experiences with living in a deprived area and meeting SOME people like the ones portrayed as well as SOME who were not. I do not believe nor do I claim that it was ALL people either in the area I lived or ALL people who claim benefits.

Why Far Right is more Left than Right

I have been feeling a little bit annoyed recently with descriptions of conservative politics as Right Wing, in fact that is not strictly true what annoys me is when parties such as the BNP and Nazi Parties are called Far Right (I accept that this simply stems for the contempt I feel for racists, and how I hate to have them linked to me in any way.) it is often described as a scale going from Communism in the extreme left through Socialism and conservatism in the centre and out to fascism in the extreme Right, the problem is of cause that this, like most attempts to model a complex system is incorrect, this implies that Communism and Socialism are as far from fascism as you can get where as in fact they are the closest to each other, I would suggest that in fact the system is much more of a circle than a line with Communism and Fascism pulling support from roughly the same areas.

For example, Racism which is obviously a key tenant of fascism is all about pluralism, the dividing of people into constituent parts (Them and Us.) this shares the most parallels with Socialist ideals of a class war, Both of these ideologies share a common factor which can be dumbed down to “My life isn’t good, and it is their fault.” Like fascism, socialism looks not at what someone can do to improve their life rather who can be blamed. This is a theme that similarly binds fascism to communism, whilst on the surface they appear to be polar opposites they are both essentially about the redistribution of resources, in fascism from foreign born to domestic citizens and in Communism from the “Haves" to the “Have Nots" (although I personally think it is more frequently the “Earned” to the “Earned Not”) only capitalism and free market economics stand apart from this trend being purposely devoid of any state intervention of wealth redistribution. In a fully capitalist system there is total equality, no one is persecuted due to race, gender, religion or as in socialism success.

Another similarity of Socialism and Fascism is that they tend to broadly pull support from the same demographic, The BNP for example do not tend to take support from the Conservatives in elections rather they take their support from Labour, this is because they offer mostly an identical message, a message that “if you are unhappy with your life it is someone else’s fault” ties both parties to people who are not as concerned with what they have as ensuring that no one else has more then them. On the other hand the Conservatives promise that they will ensure that all people have equal chances (as opposed to equal output) pulls it support from inwards facing people who ask “How can I make my life better?” therefore it is much more likely that a Labour voter would vote BNP than a Conservative voter (Who is more likely to switch to UKIP) There is a clear link from the globalization of capitalism and the globalization of Human Rights, Capitalism works when everybody is working to better themselves and therefore a successful capitalist country is one with an extensive Middle Class and it is the creation of a Middle Class that drives the majority of democratisation as they ask for more say in their own country. Socialism, Fascism and to the greatest extent Communism look to prevent people from pushing for freedoms by replacing capitalist tendencies towards equality with “Big Government” control.

So next time you hear the phrase Far Right remember that the political landscape is less a line and more a circle.