Rejecting The Binary

An example of a typical Twitter thread…

User #1: I like dogs.

User #2: What about cats? Your horrible felineophobia disgusts me. Bigot! You are worse than Hitler.

Another typical example of modern media environment…

Donald Trump: I have found a cure for cancer that is 100% effective and has zero side effects.

BBC/Guardian: Donald Trump puts thousands of highly-skilled oncologists out of work. Commentators observed that many of those affected are people of colour.

Modern political discourse is the home of the binary and the triumph of emotion over fact…

I reject both.

I heard the phrase ‘sometimes two things can both be true at the same time’ on a podcast discussing, what else, the American election. In the binary world of Twitter and much of modern political discourse, if A is true then B must be false. This is not so – perhaps both A and B are true. Likewise, if A is false, then B must be true. Again, this is not so – perhaps A and B are both false. Religious types are particularly fond of this argument; if science cannot state a reason for a particular event or phenomenon then ‘god’ must have done it. This is known as the ‘god of the gaps’ but the biggest problem for religious people is that the ‘gaps’ keep shrinking as science advances leaving ‘god’ responsible for less and less. Ho hum.

I’d like to share some examples of situations where two things are true at the same time.

1/ The obvious place to start is with the recent US election. Whilst it is true that Donald Trump is not fit to be President of the United States ( I wrote this post in February 2017), it is also true that. Joe Biden is Establishment through-and-through and is the epitome of the arrogant ruling class rejected by voters in 2016.

2/ Exactly the same thing can be said about Britain. Boris Johnson – an upper class buffoon pretending to be a buffoon – is not fit to be prime minister. But the oily Keir Starmer – a multimillionaire lawyer and owner of a very proletarian knighthood – and his Shadow Cabinet of public school ponces is not the answer to the entrenched class inequality in the UK.

3/ It is true that people who undergo gender realignment surgery are as deserving of respect as anyone else. Having worked with a transgender person in the 90s, the worst thing I can say about her was that she was utterly useless at the job. Of course I would use someone’s preferred pronouns because I was brought up to be polite. However, it is also true that some people on the wilder shores of the transgender cult (anyone who remembers the benighted 1970s may recall that folks used to be called “sweet transvestites from transexual Transylvania”) have completely taken leave of their senses, particularly in their insistence that ‘trans women are women’ in the same way natal women are women when they are clearly not.

4/ It is obvious to anyone with half a brain that ‘black lives matter.’ In the same way that all humans lives matter. However , it is also obvious that Black Lives Matter is a divisive, supremacist and, yes, racist organisation as I outlined in Strange Bedfellows.

5/ Whilst we are discussing BLM, it is true that some people are racist and that many people in the past may well have held views considered racist today. However, it is also true that not every little thing is racist and that racism – whether ‘systemic,’ ‘institutional’ or everyday – is not the explanation for absolutely everything.

6/ It is true that opposition to fascism is a given – I’m pretty sure most people who read this blog have contempt for the mouth-breathers of the BNP or the knuckle-draggers of the EDL. However, it is also true that Antifa are not a progressive or even pleasant group of people. Dressing up in black and attacking opponents in mobs is not ‘anti’ fascism; in fact, it may well be fascism. Antifa are anti-fascists in the same way that the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP – Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), led by noted left-winger Adolf Hitler, were Socialists.

7/ In a democratic society, it is absolutely true that you have the right to your own views and to air those views – freedom of speech for all including Flat Earthers and anti-vaxxers. However, I’m afraid that I do not have to share your views – I may find them ridiculous, offensive or even comic. Religious nutters who demand RESPECT for their mad ideas should think about getting some respectable beliefs instead of mutilating children’s genitals, threatening their opponents with eternal torture and beheading schoolteachers.

8/ If I may combine points #5 and #7, it is very true that some people in the West are racially prejudiced against people from North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. However, it is also true that ‘Muslim’ is not a race and that Islam is a repellant, violent and misanthropic ideology.

9/ It is true that the Bible is a grotesquely immoral book. Both the psychotic deity of the Old Testament and the vicious Jewish sectarian (Matthew 15:21-28) of the New Testament are repugnant to modern sensibilities. But just because the Bible is a horrible book does not excuse the Koran for being violent, supremacist and intolerant. As Sam Harris has commented…

“As a source of objective morality, the Bible is one of the the very worst books we have. It might be the very worst, in fact, if we didn’t also have the Koran.”

Anyone who wants to accuse me of Islamophobia (pfft) should know that Islam also venerates the Bible so any clueless identity obsessives trying to contextualise the Koran are actually doubling the number of violent books followed by their pet victims.

I’d like to conclude with two people I bet you’ve never seen in a sentence together before – Mary Whitehouse and Aristotle. Mary Whitehouse was a mad, right-wing, religious nutjob who wanted to ban ‘dirty’ programmes because even seeing some things would be damaging – exactly the sort of argument put forward by upper class pseudo-leftists in 2020. Aristotle, pupil of Plato and tutor to Alexander the Great, put forward the far more enlightened and progressive view that…

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”