politics on Tales from the Bitface

Thu, 07 May 2026 17:20:56 +0100

Voting day today, for most of us in the UK. All those local councils and mayors aren’t going to elect themselves (luckily).

Vote for the ones who are going to make sure the bins get collected, the schools are good, social housing gets built… OK, Labour, I mean vote Labour.

Why Can't We Find Out What the Green Party is Proposing?

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:00:39 +0000

I’ve been hearing about the Green Party’s conference motion against ‘Zionism’, and how it seemingly is deeply antisemitic, and will effectively have them supporting Hamas. I didn’t want to write about it without reading the actual motion. But that appears not to be possible unless you’re a party member. It’s behind a login requirement. I can’t find anywhere that actually quotes the motion.

The Guardian and the BBC don’t seem to have reported on it at all. The Daily Mail has something behind a paywall, but its headline claims the motion ‘would make it party policy to back Hamas terror attacks’. The Canary’s article on it¹ speaks warmly about it, saying it ‘could be a game changer for UK politics.’

Well, yes, and not in a good sense.

It’s one thing to be against some actions of the current Israeli government. Quite another to support — even tacitly — an organisation dedicated to the eradication of the entire nation and people of Israel. Hamas and Hezbollah are Nazis, and all people of the left should oppose them and their aims just as much as we opposed the National Front and the British National Party.

But without being able to read the motion, it’s hard to know how extreme it is. You might argue it’s a private matter for the party, unless and until it becomes their policy. Up to a point, that seems fair. But I think political parties have a duty of transparency. They want people to join them and vote for them. Therefore they should let the public know the kind of things they’re talking about.

And the mainstream press should be reporting on it.

And hey, who knew The Canary still existed? ↩︎

Identity Is The Crisis, Can't You See?

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 22:58:30 +0000

I recently read Alembic Offerings, by hippieish writer Erik Davies. It included this line, which intrigued me:

I cut my teeth in the post-structuralist 1980s, more interested in difference than identity.

It reminded me of how I had long been confused by identity politics. That is, for years — possibly decades — when I heard the term ‘identity politics’, I had supposed it to be about individual identity, about how each of us is different.

Which means I must have actually been confused by some of the things I read that used the term, since it means almost exactly the opposite.

My misunderstanding came from the idea of proving one’s identity, of identifying yourself, showing identity documents. Identifying a suspect, even. They all mean demonstrating that a person is a specific, unique individual.

Whereas identity politics is about memberships of groups.

It feels like a linguistic shift. I am a member of several groups, but none of them uniquely identifies me. Even the intersection of all of them doesn’t do that. So why does the politics of group membership get tagged with the term ‘identity’?

Well it turns out the Latin root of the word relates to similarity:

mid 16th century (in the sense ‘quality of being identical’): via French from late Latin identitas, from Latin idem ‘same’.

to quote the Mac OS dictionary. But different fields use it differently. From Wikipedia’s Identity (social science) :

Identity is the set of qualities, beliefs, personality traits, appearance, or expressions that characterize a person or a group.

Identity emerges during childhood as children start to comprehend their self-concept, and it remains a consistent aspect throughout different stages of life. Identity is shaped by social and cultural factors and how others perceive and acknowledge one’s characteristics. The etymology of the term “identity” from the Latin noun identitas emphasizes an individual’s “sameness with others”. Identity encompasses various aspects such as occupational, religious, national, ethnic or racial, gender, educational, generational, and political identities, among others.

But in its Identity (philosophy) we find:

In metaphysics, identity (from Latin: identitas, “sameness") is the relation each thing bears only to itself. The notion of identity gives rise to many philosophical problems, including the identity of indiscernibles (if x and y share all their properties, are they one and the same thing?), and questions about change and personal identity over time (what has to be the case for a person x at one time and a person y at a later time to be one and the same person?).

So the politics version appears to come from the social science use of the word, unsurprisingly.

Funny old word, identity. I think, like Erik Davies, I’m more interested in difference than identity, in the group-membership sense.

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 23:52:16 +0000

Good piece by Jonathan Freedland about the disastrous state of the war in Iran. I know I said I felt supportive at the start, and I still want to see the Islamic Republic’s regime fall, and Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis with it. But sadly it isn’t likely this can make that happen.

Purity Poetry

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 23:30:44 +0000

A great post from Ian Betteridge, called Zen fascists will control you…. Dead Kennedys fans will recognise the title as a quote from ‘California Über Alles’, their single and album track from 1979. Ian builds on it to write a history of the various movements, ideas, cults, that have believed or supposed that humans can be improved or perfected, by diet, exercise, drugs, physical enhancement…

Or by following the word of an ‘enlightened’ leader, for example.

He sees the overarching theme as purity:

This is the thing about the politics of purity that makes it so durable, and so dangerous: it doesn’t require malice. It requires only the conviction that you know what clean looks like, and the will to impose it on others, for their own good.

Both the counterculture and the authoritarian right are obsessed with purity. The targets differ wildly — the body, the race, the culture, the blood, the food, the mind. But the cognitive shape is identical. And that shared shape is the on-ramp. It’s how you can get from granola to fascism without ever feeling like you’ve made a wrong turn.

He traces the idea through Joni Mitchell singing ‘we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden’ to the Human Potential Movement and the Whole Earth Catalog, to est, and from there to the modern biohacking idea¹, and billionaires trying to extend their lives using the blood of young people.

You can draw a straight line from est to the productivity cult of contemporary tech culture, to the biohacking movement, to the particular flavour of self-optimisation that has become the dominant religion of the Silicon Valley overclass.

And connects it to the Nazis:

The line from the organic farm to the death camp is not straight. It requires many other things to be true simultaneously. But the fact that it is possible to draw the line at all should give us pause, every time we find ourselves in the presence of someone who is very, very concerned with purity — of whatever kind.

It’s an excellent piece, and the guy’s a great writer. So it slightly surprises me that, after he writes:

somewhere in the feed, the purity logic is still running, clean and patient, waiting for the next person to decide that they have woken up. That they are clean.

he doesn’t extend his argument to the state of the modern ‘woke’ idea. Detached from its origins in Black US culture, its adherents demand such a strong acceptance of all parts of the ‘omnicause’, that any disagreement about one tenet of the belief system can lead to ostracism. Purity politics at its purest.

Or so it seems, at least. And indeed, Ian appears to insulate or distance himself from such an attack in his first footnote:

I should make this clear up front: when I talk in this essay about “purity politics”, what I’m not talking about the kind of instant condemnation that happens on social media platforms (Bluesky, I am looking at you). That’s interesting, but it’s not what I’m interested in right now.

Those attackers on Bluesky sound like exactly the type of hyper-woke folks I’m thinking of.

OK, he’s mainly talking about the danger of these beliefs from today’s super-rich; but they need foot soldiers. Mobs can be as dangerous as rich individuals.

Which I see doesn’t have a proper Wikipedia article, but there are various related links at that page, and if the proper article is ever written it should go there and this footnote will be obsolete. ↩︎

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:18:20 +0000

I know we’re not supposed to celebrate the death of another human being. But what else can you do when it’s Khamenei?

I mean, do you think anyone one didn’t celebrate Hitler’s death in 1945?

I just hope the Iranian people will be able to rise up and free themselves after this. Sadly, history does not hold many examples of this kind of thing working out.

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 18:36:07 +0000

It feels very strange to be supportive of the USA attacking a middle-eastern country (or any country). Even more so when it’s Trump in charge. But the chance this could bring down the Islamic Republic — that evil, terrorism-exporting, citizen-murdering regime — is much to be hoped for.

Of course, it won’t be as simple as that. Things never are. The desire to find simple answers to huge, complex questions, is at least partially the cause of many of our problems today.

But still. The idea that the Iranian people might have the chance to overthrow that monstrous regime: that is huge.

Class Distinction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:29:50 +0000

Over on BlueSky, Andrew Hickey of the excellent A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs podcast shares a post about the modern British class system, by someone who goes by ‘John Bull’. I think I used to follow him on Twitter. The post says:

Class in the UK is pretty easy to understand.

Top 1% of wealth = upper class
Bottom 1% = working class

Everyone else self-defines as “upper-working class” regardless of actual income.

They will think one of the other groups are “scroungers”. But never both.

Which is at least partly intended as humorous, I think, and so exaggerates for effect. But it may not be far from the truth. Except… I don’t recall ever having heard the term ‘upper working class’ before.

The class that does traditionally get split is middle: upper middle class, lower, middle class, these are (or were) common enough terms. And sociologists use (or used to use) the letter system, which had ABC1, C2, C3. Possibly others, but I don’t recall. I assume A–C map to the traditional upper–working range, which means they split the working class up, but not the middle? I don’t know.

Anyway, I tweeted¹ at Andrew saying I’d never heard the term, and he replied he had, a lot. Someone else in the comments also said they hadn’t heard it.

All to say nothing in particular, except I’m thinking that traditionally it wasn’t just about either wealth or income, but titles. You couldn’t be upper class without a title. But now I’m wondering if the so-called nobility sit (or sat) above even the upper class.

If there’s a special verb for posting on BlueSky I haven’t heard it, so I’ll stick with the old workhorse. ↩︎

📗 Books 2025, 21: The Book of Daniel, by EL Doctorow

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 21:14:14 +0000

It’s a strange thing, or so it seems to me, to deal with a political event of your own lifetime, by writing a fictional version of a life. And not of one of the protagonists, but of an imaginary version of one of their children. Yet this is what we have here, and it’s on the whole successful.

Doctorow takes the story of the Rosenbergs, who were accused of conspiracy to commit espionage against the USA, convicted, and executed in 1953. Changing their name to Isaacson, he tells the story of their son, Daniel, along with his younger sister, Susan. In reality the Rosenbergs had two boys, but their ages were similar, and some of what happened to them after their parents' arrest, according to Wikipedia, is similar to the experiences of Daniel and Susan.

As a novel it’s extremely well written, both readable and literary. It uses a number of devices — I might call them gimmicks, if that didn’t seem too dismissive, but I’m not sure I understand the reason for them. It switches frequently between Daniel’s first person and third — sometimes within the same sentence —, and also jumps around in time. One section is told from the point of view of the father and mother, which makes sense, as it’s when they are in prison and on trial, where Daniel would have no access to them.

The whole thing is presented as the thesis (or part of it) that Daniel is writing for his PhD, so there are several levels of meta involved. The main problem I had with it was the adult Daniel is at times a thoroughly objectionable character. There are a couple of early scenes where he sexually humiliates his young wife that nearly made me throw the book across the room.

Protagonists don’t have to be pleasant characters, of course, but this seemed prurient to me. I suppose we’re meant to understand he’s been damaged, if not abused. by his experiences, and goes on to abuse in turn. But I’m not sure the two sides tie up that well. The scenes of the young kids trying to make their way after their parents are gone, running away from an awful children’s home and returning to their now-empty house, are very moving.

Susan is in a mental institution at the start, and apparently dies there. Her story is the one that’s missing from this, in fact. We learn about her as a kid, certainly, and there are some interactions with Daniel when they’re older, then they’re estranged for a while. Then he visits her at the institution and she dies offstage. It feels like a gap, but again, maybe that’s how life feels sometimes.

As I say, it’s an unusual choice. Doctorow could have written a story about children torn from their parents and all that implies, without making it so closely tied to real events. Or he could have written a biography of the Rosenbergs. The latter would be a different kind of thing, though, and probably have a different readership. You’d only read such a biography if you were specifically interested in the case or the people, while you can read this as a novel without even knowing it’s inspired by real events. And maybe that’s the reason for using the events as the seed.

Waiting for Yellow Ribbons

Fri, 16 May 2025 23:35:35 +0000

Searching for the Man

The state of internet search these days is such that it can be hard to find things that — while you don’t know they’re there — you know must be there.

It’s as if the search engines give up after a bit and just show more links to the same videos. Or lyrics sites, in this case. I found myself at the Wikipedia page for answer songs, and idly scrolled through it. Mainly I wondered what they’d say about ‘Here Comes Your Man’, by the Pixies. If you’ve swum in the same pools of the indie/punk/post-punk floodwaters as me, you’ll have long realised that Black Francis must have written that song, in part at least, as an answer to The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’. (Note the formulation of the title from the first album; many people and versions characterise it as ‘Waiting for My Man’, since that’s what the lyrics say.)

There was no reference to the song on the page. Slightly odd, I thought. I looked at the song’s own page. No reference there to the Velvets or Lou Reed.

If you doubt the connection, just listen to the two songs. There’s the riff on the Pixies song, plus all the references to ‘waiting’ in it, as well as the obviousness of the title. Sure, it’s not only that, or even, really, about ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ in any sense. But it’s unthinkable that the one didn’t inspire the other. Let’s not forget Black Francis wrote, in another song, ‘I wanna be a singer like Lou Reed/I like Lou Reed.’

Others must have written about this, I thought, and started googling around. Well, I use DuckDuckGo, but you know. And I even tried switching to Google. Nothing came up, except for the odd little Reddit post saying, ‘Hey, this song’s a bit like that song.’ Yet you’ve got to imagine — it’s hard not to imagine – people will have written about it. Music journalists, bloggers… hell, I’m surprised I haven’t mentioned it before now.

But nothing turned up. I’m sure those pages are out there, lost for now in the deep pools of the web. But the search engines just don’t want to go there anymore.

Tying Ribbons

I was looking into answer songs because I’d been reading the page on ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’, and it mentioned there being an answer song.

I was looking at that page because we were talking about the origin of people tying yellow ribbons when they’re waiting for someone to come home. I thought it might have originated with the song. It was certainly the first time most of us here in the UK heard the expression. When Americans festooned buildings with yellow ribbons during the Iran hostage crisis, it seemed like a reference to the song.

But the page suggested the origin is much older, possibly going back to the US civil war. So much for that.

We were talking about yellow ribbons because people are displaying them again: waiting for the remaining hostages in Gaza to be freed.

Israel’s government is doubtless guilty of war crimes, probably crimes against humanity. And October the 7th was a crime against humanity. I’m all for freeing Palestine, but free the hostages too, and if you can get rid of Hamas too while you’re doing it, so much the better.

Free Palestine from Hamas.

Maybe You Can Post Your Way Through Fascism

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 20:55:58 +0000

There was a post about how ‘You can’t post your way out of fascism’ that did the rounds a few weeks ago. I have a feeling it might have done some harm.

I didn’t read it in detail. Saw the headline, skimmed it, got the gist. Resistance to Trump/Muskism and the other right-wing authoritarian risings around the world: it needs more than tweets, toots, blog posts.

Fair enough.

But not everyone can do more, or give more. And even those who can, or could or should: for some of us, writing is not just what we do, it’s what we are. We need to write. And I know I’ve felt some discouragement a few times lately, when I might have written about Trump, or Musk’s nazi salute, or the general horror of things. I’ve thought, ‘Yeah, but “You can’t post your way…"’

I wouldn’t go so far as to say my memory, my knowledge of the existence of that post has stopped me posting. Other things, or a combination of things, have done that. But it’s in there, like a spectre at the writing table, saying, ‘No, this isn’t enough, so you shouldn’t do it.’

That is almost certainly not what the writer intended. But I think it’s unhelpful at best, and may be harmful to some people at worst.

Posting won’t be enough to get us out of fascism, but it might help some people to get through it.

So please, everyone, don’t be discouraged; and don’t stop posting.

Trumpeting

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 12:53:18 +0000

I was shocked, but not exactly surprised, by the US election result. Or no: I was surprised. I think I had somehow internalised that idea that Kamala Harris would win. It seemed unthinkable that Americans would elect Trump again.

But then, it seemed unthinkable that they would elect him the first time.¹

We shouldn’t be too surprised though. Among the presidents in my lifetime, we’ve had Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and W Bush. All of them considered to be dangerous warmongering borderline fascists at the time. And/or comical and incompetent choices, to consider Reagan and W Bush, specifically.

Yet America elected all of them (notwithstanding that the popular vote nearly always favoured their Democratic opponent).

Trump, of course, rolls the ills of all of them up into one great ugly package, and adds narcissism on top. And the times could hardly be worse for women in America in particular, with reproductive healthcare under attack with the overturning of Roe v Wade.

What can you do, though? Life goes on. We’ll get through it, except for those of us who don’t.

For some reason I couldn’t find that post when I wrote this, so I said, ‘I’d link to my post from back then, but apparently I didn’t make one. Only a couple before the election and this general one in early 2017. Sometimes it’s all too much to write about.’ But I did write about it, and used the same title as on this post! Oh dear. ↩︎

To the Polls!

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 07:49:13 +0000

And don’t forget your photo ID.

It feels like 97, but I have a niggling fear that we’ve been played and it could still go all 92 on us. Articles like this one: Tories concede defeat with 24 hours until general election polls open, from The Independent yesterday, feel like tactics, more than news.

The intent being, of course, to reduce the anti-Tory turnout (and the overall turnout).

So go and vote. Please. Don’t let these fuckers do any more harm to our country.

One More Week to Hang On

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 06:59:49 +0000

I seem to have largely stopped blogging. Certainly, as a general election approaches, I’ve written nothing publicly about politics.

Consider: in just over a week we could be rid of this appalling Tory government. The Labour one we get in its place (or, just possibly, a coalition) will probably not be much to write home about, but even if its policies are far from perfect, its plans to tax the rich and invest in the country’s infrastructure far weaker than I’d like: things can hardly be worse.

Indeed, they can only get better, right?

I saw Keir Starmer speak at the Fabian Society a few years back. 2020, surprisingly, but January, before the pandemic really got going. He came across there as a thoroughly good and decent, left-wing, progressive guy. I can’t remember anything he said specifically, but it was positive, you know?

Now, he’s generally seen as timid, scared of appearing to be too left-wing, that sort of thing, or worse. While at the same time seemingly fierce at purging the left of the party. And poor on women’s rights, to say nothing of his dealings with women MPs and candidates.

Still, after the shitshow of the last few years, I’ll accept competence, as long as it’s not right-wing competence.

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 17:14:06 +0000

This Scottish MP who’s been ousted by the people for breaking Covid rules: I think this is the first time we’ve had a recall in the UK.

Now, what we need is to have the policy extended to the whole of parliament. Could we get 10% of the electorate to vote to recall the current parliament? Yes. Yes, we could.