Welcome to the idiocracy!

Last week I wrote an article detailing the extraordinary bad faith tactic of Performative Stupidity, which is the increasingly prevalent journalistic method of attacking something, not by detailing it and then highlighting criticisms, but by simply pretending to be too stupid to understand it!

This week I've come across the most glaring example yet of this Performative Stupidity dumbing-down of political discourse, which takes the form of a Tweet that implies that any policy that takes more than three words to explain is somehow inferior to policies which can be expressed in three words or fewer, or "less" as the supposedly award-winning journalist puts it.

The intended take away being that super-simple policies for dealing with massively complex and divisive issues are credit-worthy, while anything that takes more than three words to explain is open to derision!

Labour's Brexit policy

Labour's Brexit strategy really isn't that difficult to understand. Here it is again:

1. Prevent Tory No Deal chaos and economic ruination. 

2. Remove the Tories (who created all this Brexit chaos in the first place) from power. 

3. Renegotiate the Withdrawal Agreement (Customs Union, Single Market access, no border in Ireland, protection of workers' rights, cooperation on environment, science, and security). 

4. Put the renegotiated deal to a confirmatory referendum with remain as an option, meaning that there are sensible (non-meltdown) options on either side.

Of course this is more than three words, because it's rather difficult to cram a 4-point action plan into "three words or less [sic]" isn't it?

But if you did insist, for some unfathomable reason, on dumbing it down to just three words, you could say "Final Say Referendum" - but why on earth would you even want to do that?

Labour's policy is to offer representation to both sides of the Brexit divide in a way that avoids completely trashing the economy if people once again reject the option to Remain (sorry 27 words is far too many for my tiny little journalist brain to comprehend, how about you cut it down to 3 and I'll have another go!).

But then you look at the Lib-Dem and Tory Brexit policies that are supposedly so wonderful and virtuous for being reducible to just three words, and they really should be setting off all kinds of alarm bells, at least for the kind of journalist who uses the traditional method of actually scrutinising things, rather than the new method of pretending not to understand them.

Lib-Dems: Revoke Article 50

Two questions about this spring immediately to mind.

The first is what the hell happened to the Lib-Dem policy of demanding another referendum?

Demanding a People's Vote referendum has been the Lib-Dem shtick for the last couple of years, but now they've transitioned to a completely different policy, of revoking article 50 with no democratic mandate from the people via a referendum, and there's no criticism from the mainstream media hack pack whatever!

Every time Labour has even slightly modified or reworded their Brexit stance it's been met with a barrage of mainstream criticism and derision, but the Lib-Dems publicly tear up their entire policy and flip-flop to something entirely different, and they actually get praised on the basis that the new policy can be summed up in just three words!

The second glaringly obvious question is how?.

How do the Lib-Dems intend to revoke Article 50 when a parliamentary majority to revoke Article 50 with no democratic mandate from the people is literally impossible in the current parliament, and vanishingly unlikely in the next parliament?

These are the kind of questions that award-winning journalists should be asking, rather than evaluating policies purely on how few words they can be reduced to.

Tories: Leave October 31st

There are plenty of questions any reasonable journalist could ask about this, but I'll just stick to the two most glaringly obvious ones.

How do the Tories ensure the UK leaves the EU on October 31st when they've thrown away their parliamentary majority by hoofing 20+ Tory MPs out of the party for daring to defy Dominic Cummings, when they've completely lost control of the parliamentary order paper, and when they've lost every single parliamentary vote since Johnson became Prime Minister?

Just like the Lib-Dems, it's easy having simple ambitions. But without a realistic plan of action for how you actually achieve them, what are they actually worth?

The other glaring question is why?

Why the rush to leave on a specific date, even if the consequences of leaving in such a rush are likely to be extremely catastrophic (by your own government's internal Yellowhammer impact assessment).

Little children know to wait for a safe opportunity to cross the road rather than rushing out across busy traffic because an arbitrary amount of time has passed, but somehow the Tory government don't, and furthermore their "run in front of traffic" Brexit strategy is apparently praiseworthy for the fact it can be condensed to just three words!

Welcome to the idiocracy!

Any journalist with any kind of integrity would seek to present all of the main parties' Brexit strategies, and then subject them to criticism. But the current trend is to either pretend to be too stupid to understand Labour's position, or to praise other parties' policies, not because they make any kind of pragmatic sense, but because they can be simplified into the simplest of simple sound bites!

Is the best measure of a policy whether it is achievable from a pragmatic perspective, or how few words it can be expressed in?

Apparently the new answer to this question is the word count!

And the guy responsible for this deliberate stupidification of British political discourse isn't just some Twitter idiot mouthing off, he's an apparently award-winning Financial Times journalist.

If award-winning journalists at one of Britain's most prestigious newspapers is engaging in this kind of ludicrous performative stupidity, then it just goes to show how broken our mainstream media is.

We want super-simple solutions to massively complicated and multi-faceted problems or we're going to pretend to be too stupid to understand is a corrosive and irresponsible bad faith stance in its own right.

But in light of the fact that Brexit was caused by exactly this kind of simple solution (quit the EU) to complex problems (austerity, failing public services, unaffordable housing, negative wage growth, soaring utility bills, NHS queues, over-crowded schools, vandalised social safety net ...), it's illustrative of the fact that award-winning journalists at the top of their god-damned profession haven't even learned one of the most basic and salient lessons from this whole Brexit debacle: "sometimes things are a lot more complex than a slogan you can fit on the side of a bus, let alone into "three words or less [sic]".

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