Why do so many people get offended at facts they don't like?

Who is Ross Greer? 

Well according to Twitter he's a "laughing ginger turd", a "horrible little bastard", an "arrogant fool", a "pompous little toad", a "smirking offensive little twat", an "absolute fucking weapon", a "sneering sniggering little twat", a "horrible and hateful little shit", "a silly ginger cunt",  a "little idiot", a "snide spoilt little boy", an "ugly ginger little snowflake cunt", a "little liberal ginger jihadist", a "pompous weasel", a " stupid little dumb shit ginger", a "massive bell end", a "disrespectful ginger mutant", "the reason ginger people get picked on", a "slimy nonce ginger cunt", "just a prick", and "everything that's wrong with this country these days"!

Blimey you might think. He must have done something pretty bloody bad to trigger such a massive outpouring of hate.

But you'd be wrong. All Ross Greer tried to do was to provide a bit of historical perspective on the legacies of Winston Churchill by talking about issues like Churchill's contempt for the working classes and his role in the Bengal famine.

However the problem with attempting to use facts and evidence to critique prevailing narratives like the lionisation of Churchill is that in modern Britain an awful lot of people get extremely angry and offended when confronted with facts that they don't like.

Of course Churchill deserves credit for getting some things right. When the Tory party and almost the entire British establishment class became utterly fixated by the lure of fascism in the 1930s Churchill was one of the few amongst them who defied this shocking trend because he rightly saw fascism as the danger it was.

And once he became Prime Minister Churchill recognised the crucial strategic importance of bringing both Russia and the United States into the war on Britain's side.

A more ideologically driven anti-communist (of which there were very many in the British establishment at the time) could have simply watched Russia fall under Nazi control rather than actively supporting the Soviet Union with the Arctic Convoys in order to keep Hitler's forces divided and fighting on multiple fronts as Churchill did.

Churchill was a sadistic Tory. He set the British army on striking workers in Scotland and south Wales, he had racist views on imperialist conquest, he was utterly indifferent to the starvation of millions of people in Bengal to the point of joking about why Gandhi hadn't died in it, he sent the black and tans to Ireland, before the war he'd been a supporter of poison gas and concentration camps, and after the war his government brutally repressed the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya through collective punishment, torture and castration.

But on the other hand when fascism was so trendy that his Tory colleagues were signing up in droves to anti-Semitic groups like the Right Club, and the royal family were indoctrinating the young Elizabeth to give Nazi salutes in their palace gardens, Churchill was one of the few amongst his peers to buck that horrifying trend.

The man was an enigma who is understandably glorified by many as a great war leader, but equally understandably detested by others because of his brutality and sadism. 

And as Churchill himself once said "The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is".

But by telling the truth about some of Churchill's darker legacies on national television, the relatively obscure MSP Ross Greer has triggered an absolute tsunami of hatred and abuse from people who are offended by his facts.

Just look at Piers Morgan's conduct during the interview.

It's apparently so "wildly offensive" to discuss uncomfortable facts about Winston Churchill that people like Piers have furious adult temper tantrums over it, and yet they call people on the left "snowflakes" who take offence too easily!pic.twitter.com/jBegj33ww2

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) January 29, 2019

Instead of following a reasonably impartial line of questioning Morgan worked himself up into such a fit of rage that he couldn't even listen to the words that Greer was saying.

And this extraordinary adult tantrum was performed by a man who routinely denounces people on the left as being over-sensitive "snowflakes" who get offended by reality!

Suzanna Reid's behaviour was perhaps even more extraordinary than Morgan's when she brazenly straw-manned Greer's argument by plucking a comparison with Hitler out of thin air, and then described Greer's facts as "offensive".

It's not our TV presenters' role to invite people on their shows just to shout them down, lie about their argument, and dismiss their facts as "offensive". That's more of a circus than anything resembling informed debate.

And if our television presenters behave in this extraordinary manner, is it any wonder that members of the public also get so offended by facts that they don't like that they take to Twitter to hurl torrents of personal abuse at the deliverer of said facts?

Amongst the torrents of witless abuse one criticism of Ross Greer was particularly telling. After telling Ross to "fuck off" one of the triggered snowflakes claimed that Greer is "everything that's wrong with this country nowadays".

In reality the real problem with this country is glaringly obvious.

The problem is that there are huge numbers of people out there who get unbelievably angry at facts they don't like, who spew torrents of hate at anyone who dares talk about the facts they don't like, and who vote for dumb shit like giving the Tory party the green light to conduct a "make it up as we go along" Brexit farce because they absolutely refuse to listen to the facts that they don't like.

The problem with modern Britain isn't that Churchill was a racist and sadistic imperialist, because that's now history.

Neither is the problem that some people want to introduce a tiny bit of historical balance by highlighting the fact that as well as being the war leader who led Britain in the fight against Nazism, Churchill was also a racist and sadistic imperialist, because that's simply the truth.

The problem is that we're becoming a nation full of emotionally unstable and over-opinionated adult toddlers who feel entitled to publicly abuse anyone who offends them with facts they don't like.

And the torrents of abuse aimed at Ross Greer suggests that this over-sensitive snowflakery isn't actually a left-wing thing either, coming mainly from right-wingers and ultranationalists.

Maybe this lot actually want to live in a country where it's considered normal behaviour for people to online bully a person to the extent of furiously smearing him as a paedophile, simply because they find his facts offensive?

But the damage these tantrum-throwing adult-toddlers are doing to the standard of political discourse, and to the nation as a whole, is pretty damned obvious to the rest of us.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

How the mainstream media are burning ordinary people on their anti-Corbyn bonfire of hate

Last week the Sky News reporter Lewis Goodall turned up in Stoke to vox pop a load of people who were queuing to get into a Jeremy Corbyn speech. One of the people he spoke to accidentally said that Jeremy Corbyn had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (instead of the Sean McBride Peace Prize).

Goodall then included this short clip in a compilation deriding the "cult of Corbyn". The piece then went mega viral on Twitter with right-wingers and the usual 'centrist' bullies absolutely dog-piling the poor woman for her stupidity.

What nobody was ever told amongst this outpouring of hatred, contempt and derision was that the woman in question had quickly realised her mistake, then asked Lewis Goodall not to use the clip where she misspoke. 

He ran it anyway.

Of course running a clip when a member of the public has asked you not to because they realised they'd misspoken betrays an extreme lack of journalistic ethics on Lewis Goodall's part, but this isn't really the main issue.

The main problem is the way the mainstream media and a bunch of vile Twitter bullies savagely attacked a random member of the public in a desperate proxy attack on Jeremy Corbyn.

We've all seen the shocking levels of anti-Corbyn bias in the mainstream media. The way they endlessly promote absolute rubbish like not bowing-deeply enough, fake photoshop pictures to make it look like he was dancing, the Czech spy nonsense, the Russian stooge nonsense, the wreath nonsense ... all in order to distract public attention away from the grotesque track record of the Tory government they're trying to protect.

Corbyn has shown that he's strong enough to withstand these attacks, and left-wing public figures like me have gradually learned to withstand the regular tides of insults, abuse, defamatory accusations, lies, and threats from right-wingers and so-called 'centrists' (Labour right-wingers being about on a par with Ukippers for abusive blind fury responses to information and opinions they don't like).

But it's a completely different story when the anti-Corbyn mob turn their hatred on a random member of the public in a desperate attempt to portray everyone who supports Jeremy Corbyn and his democratic socialist policies as members of some kind of stupid cult.

Read this from @Aldousmarx pic.twitter.com/n579PBb2ap

— ARTIST TAXI DRIVER (@chunkymark) August 20, 2018

Despite asking that the clip not be broadcast, the poor woman has been reduced to ruins, anxiety, and depression. Ashamed that she's been made to look so stupid, and even more ashamed at the damage she feels her seven second peace prize comment has done to Jeremy Corbyn and the mass movement for democratic socialism.

If mainstream media hacks and Twitter bullies are prepared to do this to an ordinary member of the public as part of their vendetta against Jeremy Corbyn, who on earth would trust them to speak out on behalf of ordinary members of the public when they're suffering systematic persecution by the government, wage repression, draconian sanctions, the effects of Tory austerity dogma, or anything else?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Why are the mainstream media ignoring the shocking Tory bigotry and bullying scandals?

The mainstream media are absolutely desperate to assist the Labour right-wingers in their plot to reduce Labour's vote at the local elections by amplifying their anti-Semitism smears, but the huge story they're ignoring is the very real problem of bullying and bigotry within the Tory party.

Just two weeks ago the Tories relaunched their youth movement with the disgraced Tory Vice Chair Ben Bradley at the forefront of the launch.

Bradley is a guy who promoted the forced sterilisation of poor people and got caught spreading totally outrageous lies on Twitter, but somehow the mainstream press didn't bother to ask how this odious man is still in his job, let alone why such a bigot is being entrusted with the Tory youth movement.

Another question they didn't bother to ask is why the Tory youth movement needed to be relaunched. The answer of course is that it was shut down after a young Tory activist was bullied so badly that he was driven to suicide.

The Tories had to close down their youth movement because they actually bullied someone into suicide, and then they had the cheek to cry victim that right-wing young people are supposedly being told (by unspecified persons) that "they have to be Corbynistas"!

Bigotry and bullying have always been part of the right-wing Tory agenda, from Daily Mail articles abusing Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Tory politicians signing up to anti-Semitic groups in droves; through the shockingly racist "If you want a coloured for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour" election leaflets of the 1960s; the homophobic Section 28 legislation of the 1980s; the profoundly sexist Tory austerity dogma that has loaded 86% of the economic burden of the financial crisis onto the shoulders of women; to Theresa May quoting a disgustingly bigoted and misogynistic extreme-right Twitter troll in parliament in order to score cheap political points against Jeremy Corbyn in the recent past.

But Tory bigotry and bullying aren't just issues from the past, they're very much going on right now too.

It's just that providing proper coverage of the disgusting behaviour of the Tories runs entirely against the current mainstream media objective, which is to assist the right-wing Blairites in their plot to drive down the Labour vote at the local elections in order to have another crack at deposing Jeremy Corbyn.

If the media were in any way balanced, the following four examples of Tory bigotry and bullying would have got an absolute storm of publicity but instead they've been buried underneath a landslide of anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party, and the left in general.

Tolerance of racism

Las t week the bigoted Tory MP Ben Bradley made a huge song and dance about attracting two defectors from the Labour Party into the Tory fold.

What Bradley forgot to mention was that one of them had been suspended as a Labour Councillor for his appalling 44% attendance record, while the other one was running away from Labour because he was under investigation for alleged racism.

What a truly wonderful story for any racist politicians out there: If you get caught being a racist prick, avoid going through the investigation and expulsion process in your own party, just jump ship to the Tories before the investigation is concluded!

Self-hating Jews

At Prime Minister's Questions on March 21st Theresa May was rattled. Jeremy Corbyn was asking difficult questions about the devastating impact of Tory austerity on local council budgets, so she retorted with the classic "whataboutery" distraction tactic of talking about something else. The subject she picked was the anti-Semitism storm the Labour right-wingers have been brewing in order to attack their own party's chances at the local elections.

The problem for Theresa May is that she's such a third rate thinker that she managed to accidentally use a grotesque anti-Semitic smear during her attempted criticism of anti-Semitism within Labour. When she claimed "there is no place in Labour for those who want to tackle anti-Semitism" she  labelled every single Jewish person within the Labour Party as tolerant of anti-Semitism. 

A non-Jew accusing a significant number of Jewish people of being tolerant of anti-Semitism is clearly an act of anti-Semitism in itself because it's an invocation of the deeply anti-Semitic trope of the "self-hating Jew".

Astoundingly the mainstream media refused to even address the fact that the Prime Minister of the UK used a well worn anti-Semitic trope in order to attack the opposition party as anti-Semites.

Homophobic bullying

Within days of her team of advisers telling her to use an anti-Semitic trope to attack Jewish members of the Labour party, Theresa May's inner circle did something even more bigoted. They decided to out someone as gay against their will in a desperate effort to discredit their whistleblowing over alleged cheating by the Vote Leave campaign.

Theresa May's reaction to this outrageous piece of homophobic bullying wasn't to apologise to the victim and sack the perpetrator. In fact she didn't even bother to apologise to the victim at all, and instead put out a statement of "full confidence" in the homophobic bully!

It was possible to imagine that the decision to revenge out someone as gay was made without Theresa May's knowledge, but when she intervened to express her absolute support for the homophobic bully on her team it became obvious that Theresa May is still the raging homophobe who spent the majority of her parliamentary career voting against gay rights.

Islamophobia

On the same weekend that Theresa May's team resorted to homophobic bullying in order to defend their beloved Brexit the Tory MP Bob Blackman took to Facebook in order to share a grotesque piece of extreme-right, Islamophobic, anti-Somalian propaganda from the United States.

Blackman subsequently deleted the post and issued the extraordinary excuse that he had never actually visited the website he shared a link to, but this is a guy with a proven track record of bigotry that even went as far as promoting the EDL founder Tommy Robinson.

Has Theresa May reprimanded Blackman for his disgusting behaviour. Of course she hasn't, she's just remained completely silent and relied on the mainstream media to almost completely ignore the scandal.

Tory sexism

Over the last 8 years the Tories have pushed the deeply sexist policy of loading 86% of the economic burden of their austerity dogma onto women, but occasionally they betray their sexist attitudes in person. Take Boris Johnson's pathetic effort to demean Labour's shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry by referring to her by her husband's title.

The Speaker John Bercow rightly chastised Boris Johnson for his sexism, but the fact remains that the Tory party is stuffed full of political dinosaurs who consider addressing women by their husband's title is some kind of incredibly witty putdown.

Conclusion

You won't hear very much about the numerous Tory bigotry and bullying scandals of the last week because that would run entirely counter to the establishment objective of driving down the Labour vote at the local elections in order to give the coup-plotting Labour right-wingers another crack at deposing Jeremy Corbyn and reverting Labour to the same hard-right neoliberal economic dogma as the Tories and Lib-Dems.

But just because you don't hear about it in the mainstream media, doesn't mean that the rampant Tory bigotry and bullying aren't happening, they are, and they're absolutely scandalous.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Jess Phillips' bid to become literally the worst Labour Party troll

A little over a year ago Jess Phillips' Labour Party colleague Jo Cox was brutally stabbed and shot to death in the street by an extreme-right fanatic.

Another of Jess Phillips' Labour Party colleagues Luciana Berger has suffered a tide of outrageous anti-Semitic abuse and death threats for which three extreme-right fanatics have been jailed.

Another of Jess Phillips' Labour Party colleagues Diane Abbott suffered a massive surge of sexist and racist abuse from right-wingers during the General Election.

But who does Jess Phillips describe as "literally the worst" when it comes to sexism?

Left-wing men!

Not only is Phillips willing to overlook the actual killing of a Labour Party MP in order to spew her hatred towards a hefty chunk of Labour Party voters, she's also staggeringly hypocritical about it too.

Being abusive towards a diverse demographic like "left-wing men" is absolutely outrageous from a so-called equality champion. 

Sure some left-wing men have sexist attitudes (rendering them idiots because equality of opportunity no matter your sex, age, ethnicity or creed is one of the bedrocks of left-wing politics), but to generalise about all left-wing men as "literally the worst" in light of the absolute tide of sexist and bigoted abuse coming from the right is unbelievable stuff from someone who poses as an equality champion and a campaigner against political abuse.

Just imagine if someone used such incredibly tenuous reasoning to generalise that self-styled centrist women are "literally the worst" at politics. 

The likes of Jess Phillips would be spewing outrage in moments over such a crass generalisation wouldn't they?But they're apparently free to make crass generalisations of their own.

Phillips went on to generalise that when left-wing men "close their eyes at night and think of amazing people who have changed the world, it’s always some white dude that pops into their head".
Just imagine the outrage she would spew if anyone deigned to generalise about the sexist thoughts that all feminists have at night.

Justifiable outrage.

Phillips' so-called reasoning for launching yet another divisive and damaging attack on the Labour left is just as bad as her hypocrisy. She argued that sometimes men have objected to all-women shortlists and the like as justification for giving right-wing hacks at the Daily Telegraph yet another anti-Labour attack line by tarring all left-wing men as "literally the worst".

In her worldview it's as if working class communities objecting to the exclusion of several popular local candidates in order to parachute in a privately educated elitist candidate with absolutely no connection to the region whatever just because she's female (the Blairite special adviser Anna Turley being handed the Labour safe seat of Redcar for example) is somehow worse than right-wing fanatics sending anti-Semetic and racist abuse to female MPs, making death threats and rape threats, and even murdering female Labour Party politicians in the street!

The problem for Jess Phillips is that her rhetoric just doesn't stack up. She bases her claims that left-wing men are "literally the worst" on the fact that they sometimes object to all-female shortlists, but she must understand that the consequence of her constant trolling of her own party is to turn people away in droves.

Revulsion at the constant divisive backstabbing from Jess Phillips and her ilk will mean fewer female Labour MPs in parliament than there could have been without the deliberate wrecking tactics, and fewer female MPs overall as a consequence (because at 45% Labour have by far the best gender balance of any party with more than one MP).

Jess Phillips is so intent on continuing her strategy of internal party wrecking that she's demonstrably willing to sacrifice future female MPs at the next general election because she'd rather see future female Labour MPs lose to the Tories (just 21% of Tory MPs are women) than a left-wing man like Jeremy Corbyn become Prime Minister.

It's a wonder how on earth Jess Phillips ended up in the Labour Party at all if she's so filled with hatred and revulsion at left-wing men. Well it isn't really. Phillips must have known that Labour have the best gender balance of any party so it's impossible to avoid imagining that she decided that spending time with all the left-wing men she so clearly hates and despises was worth it because it was the best choice for her political career given that she'd be half as likely to make it as an MP in the male dominated Tory party.

Aside from driving people away from Labour with her divisive generalisations and constant attacks on the party leadership, Phillips is also doing something else. The kind of elitist identity-politics fixated feminism espoused by Phillips, Harriet Harman and Theresa May is exactly the kind of thing that drives people away from feminism too.

All three of these women supported more brutal Tory austerity measures (which impact poor and ordinary women a lot harder than poor and ordinary men). 

Theresa May has actively voted in favour of sexist austerity dogma time and again, and as temporary Labour leader Harriet Harman whipped her MPs into letting the savage Tory welfare bill pass by abstaining, which Jess Phillips dutifully went along with while over two dozen male Labour MPs (like Jeremy Corbyn, Sadiq Khan, Dennis Skinner and Richard Burgon) outright defied Harriet Harman's instructions to support sexist Tory austerity through political inaction, and voted against the bill.

The reason these women willingly trampled on millions of women from less privileged backgrounds by supporting the Tory policy of loading the financial burden of the bankers' crisis onto women's shoulders is that their elitist version of feminism is fixated on stuff like the percentage of women who are chairs of parliamentary select committees, the number of female FTSE100 directors, or the pay rates of millionaires at the BBC, not on helping women in the most need first.

Of course Phillips and her supporters will try to play sub-juvenile identity politics by saying that as a left-wing male I'm somehow proving her point by objecting to her divisive trolling and criticising her elitist version of feminism that allows her to trample on women from less privileged backgrounds while playing the victim herself. 

They'll pretend that pointing out that someone is talking hypocritical self-defeating crap is somehow worse than the tsunami of sexist and racist abuse Diane Abbott suffered during the 2017 General Election, or the constant stream of death threats and rape threats against women in politics from right-wingers, or the actual murder of a Labour Party MP by an extreme-right fanatic, but people who are motivated by hate (of genuine socialists, or men) tend to make extremely poor arguments.

The fact that Phillips and her ilk have already resorted to this tried and tested cry-bully tactic (sling abuse at a large cohort of people and then cry victim when any of them have the temerity to defend themselves or argue back) just goes to show what appalling trolls they are.

Now that the outrageously abusive troll Tom Blenkinsop has quit the party (deliberately salting his once safe Labour constituency on his way out so that it fell to the Tories) Jess Phillips has to be considered one of the prime contenders for absolute worst troll in the Parliamentary Labour Party, although she has stiff competition from men like Wes Streeting, Chris Leslie and Ian Austin.
It would be a victory of sorts for Jess Phillips' crap identity politics fixated version of feminism if she could snatch the title of "literally the worst troll in the Parliamentary Labour Party" off the men who have completely dominated the role over the years. 

By continually attacking her fellow Labour Party members, discrediting herself, discrediting the party and expending way more effort on attacking the party leadership instead of the Tories and their sexist austerity dogma, she's definitely putting up a heck of a fight to be recognised as Labour's worst troll.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Why the disparity between the way the UK media cover Donald Trump and Theresa May?

On Sunday July 2nd 2017 Donald trump tweeted something extraordinary. He shared a ridiculous doctored video of him beating up a guy whose head has been replaced with the CNN logo. You'll probably be aware of this already given the significant amount of mainstream media coverage of this bizarre Tweet on both sides of the Atlantic.

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

Before we even get into the origins of the video, the content should be deeply concerning to anyone who gives the remotest damn about the freedom of the press. 

Trump's attacks on certain sections of the media were bad enough before this doctored video clip, but anyone who imagines that the President sharing this clip wouldn't be seen as an incitement to abuse and violence towards the press amongst by the angry meat-head demographic of the Trump supporter base is clearly delusional.

The origins of the video are very much more appalling than the content itself, originating from a vile Reddit bigot calling himself Han Asshole Solo.

Not only is the creator of the video a rabid Islamophobe and anti-Semite, he's also been guilty of spreading fake news, which is quite some irony given that Trump posted the bigot's video with a rant about CNN being "fake news".

Trump was so pleased with the video clip that he'd ripped off from this Reddit bigot that he even retweeted it from the official Presidential Twitter account, meaning that it will be permanently recorded on the US public record as an official statement by the President!

The fact that the work of a depraved extreme-right bigot has been written into the US public record brings us neatly to Theresa May.

Not many people will know that Theresa May also ensured that the work of an extreme-right social media bigot was recorded on the public record by reading out a Tweet from a notorious Twitter troll account at Prime Minister's Questions as a pathetic attempt to score political points against Jeremy Corbyn.

Theresa May's decision to write this vile xenophobic and misogynistic Twitter troll into the permanent Hansard political record went virtually unnoticed by the public because the incident massively contradicted the prevailing UK mainstream media narrative that it was Jeremy Corbyn who had a lax attitude towards bigotry and online abuse not Theresa May, so went almost entirely ignored.

For some reason Theresa May never did sing the Notting Hill Carnival song
composed by her favoured Twitter troll.

Had Corbyn read out a Tweet from a vile Twitter bigot we all know the mainstream media would have leapt on it and used it as a stick to beat him with ever since, but Theresa May was allowed to get away with it completely, with only a few independent media sources ever actually bothering to highlight her appallingly poor judgement.

The fact that Trump is getting pilloried by the UK press for doing essentially the same thing that Theresa May was given a free pass for in September 2016 raises the question of why the different treatment.

Why do the UK press regularly hold Donald Trump to account for his unstable behaviour, his hard-right economic policies, his contempt for civil rights and the rule of law, and his extreme narcissistic tendencies, but they treat Theresa May with almost total reverence and deference when she has largely the same outrageous hard-right politics and the same absurdly narcissistic right-wing authoritarian personality type (minus the confidence and charisma of course)?

Is it just a case of snobby and superior Brits laughing and pointing at the silly American, when their own leader is arguably even worse?

Or is it a deep sense of ingrained subservience that lower-ranked members of the British establishment have towards their lords and masters that makes them incapable of criticising their own political leaders with anything like the venom with which they'll criticise foreign leaders?

Whether it's snobbishness towards foreigners, or ingrained British subservience, this disparity between the way British mainstream media hacks will criticise Donald Trump, but turn a blind eye to Theresa May for exactly the same kind of behaviour is totally unacceptable.

There's no way they should end this disparity by lessening their criticism of Trump, so the only way to address the problem is by treating Theresa May and her shamelessly shambolic Tory government with the same level of scrutiny and criticism as they're prepared to treat Donald Trump and his chaotic Republican administration.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The Another Angry Voice anti-bullying policy

It seems that Facebook is intent on letting the bullies and abusers win. We all know that they've allowed the extreme-right hate group Britain First spread their horrible propaganda with impunity.

It doesn't matter how many outright lies, examples of hate speech, dodgy money making scams, violent threats, bizarrely ignorant displays of insular nationalism or anti-Muslim diatribes Britain First post, nor how absolutely disgusting the comments below them, Facebook are absolutely fine with hosting an extreme-right hate group operated by a bunch of criminals and scam artists.

When it comes to my efforts to deal with bullying in an open and accountable manner, Facebook takes a completely different approach.

On Monday December 12th 2016 I posted a Facebook status asking readers for advice about what I should do about a persistent right-wing troll who has repeatedly hurled foul mouthed abuse and insults at other Another Angry Voice readers. I didn't insult or abuse the person in question, I simply pointed out their history of abusive comments and asked what people thought I should do about it.

The Facebook response was to delete the post and ban me from posting anything to Another Angry Voice for 24 hours, presumably after the abusive troll and his right-wing mates mass reported the post.

It's extraordinary that Facebook is happy to host all kinds of hateful and divisive content from extremist groups like Britain First, but when someone actually tries to deal with online abuse in an open and accountable manner, they respond by taking the side of the abusive right-wing bullies!

I always liked to conduct myself in an open and accountable manner when it came to blocking abusive accounts. I'd often consult the AAV community about the best course of action and always explain my reasons whenever deciding to delete comments or block accounts. under these new circumstances, where I face being blocked from posting to my own page by Facebook for trying to address the problem, it's obviously not sensible to try to deal with bullying and abuse in as open a manner as I'd like.

Therefore I'm going to introduce a new rule to combat bullying. 

1. All political opinions are welcome here, but anyone seen insulting or abusing other people on Another Angry Voice will be given a warning.

2. If the bullying continues after the warning, they will be banned from the page.

The reason that it's important to discourage bullying and abuse is that witnessing abuse is a clear deterrent to open political debate. If people see others being insulted, abused and threatened for expressing political opinions, then they're likely to think twice about expressing their own views.

I admit that the importance of preventing bullying for this reason had passed me by because I've become so used to being a target for hateful comments, abuse, smears and threats that it's like water off a duck's back to me these days. I hadn't stopped to think how witnessing abusive comments could be very much more intimidating to people with less experience of receiving abuse, insults and threats from Internet strangers than I have.

I'm determined to keep Another Angry Voice as open as possible and respect the free speech of people who comment, but free speech is no excuse for bullying and abuse. If I allow bullying and abusive comments to stand, that negatively impacts the free speech of the people who would be deterred from commenting out of the fear of being bullied and abused for expressing their political opinions. The free speech of people who might be intimidated by bullying and abuse is far more important than allowing right-wing trolls a platform to insult and abuse anyone they disagree with.

Ideally I would like to deal with the problem of abuse and bullying in a more open and accountable manner than this, but the way Facebook actually sides with the abusers and bullies clearly makes that kind of approach impossible. Under the circumstances the introduction of a very clear and simple anti-bullying rule seems like the most sensible solution.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Alex Andreou's "Acid Attack" article

The Former Guardian columnist Alex Andreou has posted a savagely misleading Acid Attack of an article entitled "The Truth About Jeremy Corbyn" which attacks Jeremy Corbyn and derides his supporters on his blog. At the end of the article Andreou announces that he's taking a Twitter-break with an insinuation that the reaction of people who are opposed to the Anyone But Corbyn coup would be a load of intolerable abuse.

The article is misleadingly entitled "The Truth About Jeremy Corbyn"

This article is a response to Andreou's Acid Attack article and it contains no abuse other than references to the numerous examples of the generalised abuse that Andreou hurled at Jeremy Corbyn and the hundreds of thousands of Labour members who support him, and exposures of the multiple abuses of logic, reason and evidence that Andreou peppered throughout his unpleasant, intellectually dishonest and fundamentally contradictory hatchet job.

Concern Trolling

Andreou opened his piece by claiming that he used to love Corbyn as much as he now despises him by saying "I have been as vociferous in my opposition to Corbyn as I was in supporting him a year ago".

This contrasts jarringly with his admission later on in the article that he only voted for Corbyn because he was the least-worst of the candidates. here's exactly what he said:

"I voted for him in the first place, because I thought all four candidates last time were unelectable. So I thought: 'Fuck it. If none of them can reach out to the wider electorate, I might as well vote for the one whose politics most closely align with mine'."

If he admits that he only voted for Corbyn because Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall were even worse candidates then he clearly and demonstrably wasn't as keen on Corbyn in 2015 as he is keep to trash him in 2016.

Pretending that you loved something before you set about explaining how much other people should hate it is a classic dishonest debating tactic that is commonly referred to as "concern trolling". People like Andreou try to get you onside by saying they understand how you feel in order to then relentlessly work you into switching to their side of the debate.

Corbyn vs Smith

In his initial bid to win Corbyn sympathisers over with kind words before working them with a relentless tirade of anti-Corbyn rhetoric Andreou admitted that "Corbyn has been hugely misrepresented by most media" that "the right wing press has been responsible for the worst kind of monstering" that "the lack of loyalty shown by a small cabal of colleagues, briefing against him from day one, is vile"  and that "he was never properly supported or given a decent chance", but he dismisses all of that as being "the job he signed up for" as if that magically makes it all OK!

He then goes on to admit that Owen Smith is "a bit blah" and "ain't exactly Obama" which is just about the only reference to Smith in the entire 6,300 word hatchet job of an article.

Tellingly Andreou never admits that he supports Owen Smith, or gives any single reason why Smith would make a better leader than Jeremy Corbyn. But then the clear point of the article is to damage Corbyn as much as possible, not to explain why the only alternative option for Labour members to vote for would actually be any better.

Alleged abuse

Andreou constantly whines about the supposed abuse he's received for criticising Jeremy Corbyn, but forgets to cite any examples of it, never mind any proof that the abuse came from actual members of the Labour Party.

Of course nobody should have to put up with abuse, but as a relatively high-profile political commentator it's inevitable. Long-term readers of my work will remember examples of the abuse, insults and threats that have been hurled at me for expressing my political opinions. I don't like it, but I don't use the abusive comments of a small minority of people who comment on my page to generalise about larger cohorts of people like Andreou does.

In taking a stance that is highly likely to be seen as pro-establishment by his mainly left-wing readership, Andreou knew perfectly well that he was basically Above the Line Trolling, so crying because the people he has antagonised didn't like it is a pretty lame performance.

By weaponising the claimed abuse of unnamed individuals in order to attack one of the only mainstream politicians who actively avoids the kind of dirty personal politics that David Cameron, Lynton Crosby and the Tories have legitimised through their repeated use, Andreou is simply adding to the downwards pressure on the already dispiritingly low standard of political debate in the UK.

If Andreou really has suffered any serious abuse and intimidation he should report it to the authorities because stuff like threats of violence, bigoted abuse and cyber-stalking are all crimes that should be investigated. If it's just a case of inarticulate people telling him to "fuck off" because they disagree with him he should just ignore them.

Acid Attacks

Not only does Andreou cry victim over the alleged abuse he's been getting, but he's so hypocritical that he peppers his article with critical, dismissive and abusive comments about Jeremy Corbyn and anyone who dares support him. Andreou  uses terms like "Armchair Che" and "achingly middle class Corbynistas" to denigrate Corbyn supporters and repeatedly accuses them of "fanaticism", "violent fervour","denialism", contributing to "clear patterns of wickedness" and being a "personality cult" and an "army" that will inevitably become "an instrument of violence".

This generalistic abuse is not the kind of language used by a guy who rejects bad faith tactics like abuse, smears, generalisations and condescension, they are the tactics of someone who revels in the kind of insulting muck-raking abuse that he bookends his article crying about.

Not only does Andreou use derogatory generalisations and accusations as weapons to belittle the hundreds of thousands of people from all ages, areas of the country and walks of life who support Jeremy Corbyn, he openly admits that he's "gone over the top" with his criticisms and then belligerent declares that "I stand by every acid word".

Owen Jones

Andreou actually tries to cite Owen Jones' 9 questions article as evidence against Jeremy Corbyn. The absolute gall of it is incredible.

Andreou's manipulative and highly contradictory Acid Attack article is in stark contrast to Owen Jones' article about Corbyn which actually did raise a number of legitimate questions.

Although Jones was critical of Corbyn the article was actually quite balanced and tried to engage with Corbyn supporters rather than attempting to con them with a bit of dishonest concern trolling then crudely smearing them for the rest of the article. 

You can read my response to Owen Jones' 9 questions article here.

Blame Corbyn

The entire article is littered with examples of Andreou blaming Corbyn for things that are clearly the fault of the Anyone But Corbyn coup-plotters. 

Andreou Blames Corbyn for the slump in Labour's poll numbers since the coup-plotters launched their inept effort to bully Corbyn into resignation. 

He blames Corbyn for the fact that the coup-supporting Labour establishment tried to rig the leadership election against him by disenfranchising 130,000+ Labour Party voters and then selling votes to non-members at £25 a pop. 

He even tries to blame Corbyn for the catastrophic implosion of the Labour Party in Scotland!

Scottish politics

Trying to blame Jeremy Corbyn for the annihilation of Labour in their traditional Scottish heartlands displays an extreme ignorance of Scottish politics. 

Scottish Labour lost 40 of their 41 Westminster seats at the 2015 General Election. This happened months before most people even knew who Jeremy Corbyn was. The election strategist for that complete meltdown was a Blairite called John McTernan. And guess what ... the guy who is actually most blameworthy for the Scottish debacle is standing alongside Andreou cheerleading for the Anyone But Corbyn coup.

This ludicrous effort to blame Corbyn for the damage that out-of-touch Labour right-wingers like Tony Blair, John McTernan and Jim Murphy did in Scotland is not the only example of Andreou betraying a deep ignorance of Scottish politics and the lessons that should have been learned from Labour's political suicide there.

In another section Andreou bitterly criticises Jeremy Corbyn for deliberately distancing himself from David Cameron's toxic Project Fear style Remain campaign.

I'm not too convinced that Corbyn has much idea about what to do about the Scottish mess he's inherited, but at least, unlike Andreou he had the good sense to recognise that sharing a platform with Tory fearmongerers during the EU referendum debate would have discredited the Labour Party even further in the eyes of all progressives.

The Scottish electorate abandoned Labour because they were sick of being treated like an insignificant irrelevance. Andreou exemplifies this complacent Labour attitude towards Scottish voters in his absolute unwillingness to consider the actual causes of the furious mass revolt against the Labour Party by one of it's most reliable demographics.

The EU debate

Andreou's article is full of regurgitated mainstream media attack points against Jeremy Corbyn. Even though Corbyn returned 63% of the Labour vote for Remain while Cameron's fearmongering returned 58% of Tory voters for Leave, all of Andreou's opprobrium is reserved for Jeremy Corbyn.

Polls during the EU referendum debate showed that Jeremy Corbyn was rated as by far the most trusted Labour politician and his tactic of speaking to the public like we're adults rather than a massive bunch of sub-juvenile halfwits who can be goaded into supporting one position or the other with fearmongering, threats, misrepresentations and outright lies chimed with a lot of people.

He was one of the only politicians to speak truthfully about the fact that the EU isn't ideal, but how it's better to stay in and try to reform it rather than bail out with no plan of action for what to do next, yet Andreou characterises Corbyn's EU stance as being dishonest!

Tunnel vision

Another regurgitated mainstream media anti-Corbyn attack point that Andreou blurts out is the so-called honours controversy over Shami Chakrabarti. Andreou lambastes Corbyn for appointing someone he admits is "thoroughly deserving" because it apparently "muted" the criticism of all of David Cameron's dodgy appointments.

How many of these dodgy Tory appointments has Andreou criticised? None of course.Like Peter Mandelson before him, Andreou was far, far too busy concentrating on weaving criticism of Jeremy Corbyn's one House of Lords appointment into his anti-Corbyn hatchet job to find a single word of criticism for any of David Cameron's 13 unelected cronies, another Tory donor turning down his peerage because of the storm of negative publicity or another of Cameron's dodgy Tory donors getting disallowed by the appointments commission.

Channelling Tony Blair

One quote from the article stands out because of its remarkable similarity to a sentiment expressed by Tory Blair back when he thought that his anti-Corbyn rants would serve any purpose other than sounding like a ringing endorsement in the minds of the millions of people Blair and his cronies drove away from the Labour Party.

"Right now, the only thing more frightening to any rational person than Labour losing the next election, is Labour winning it with Corbyn in charge." - Alex Andreou, 2016 

"Let me make my position clear: I wouldn’t want to win on an old-fashioned leftist platform. Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn’t take it." - Tony Blair, 2015

The sentiment that it would be much better for Labour to lose the next election than actually win with Jeremy Corbyn in charge is clearly identical. 

Perhaps if Corbyn's critics don't like being criticised as Blairites, they should consider not using the exact same form of anti-Corbyn argument as Tony Blair?

Honesty

Andreou weaves the theme of honesty throughout his article (even entitling it as The Truth About Jeremy Corbyn) which is ironic given that he shares the same objectives as the deceitful Anyone But Corbyn coup-plotters and people like Angela Eagle and Margaret Hodge who have repeatedly exaggerated and outright lied about abuse in order to inflict as much damage on the party leadership as possible.

Andreou's constant posturing as a truth-teller also clashes glaringly with his intellectually dishonest debating tactics, his brazen misrepresentations and the fact that his favoured Anyone But Corbyn candidate is a former PR man whose white shirt + rolled-up sleeves "normal guy" posing is just as brazenly dishonest as Eton educated former-PR man David Cameron's woefully transparent white shirt + rolled-up sleeves "man of the people" act.

it takes some brass neck to utilise honesty as a central theme in a bad faith Acid Attack of an article designed to assist the removal of Jeremy Corbyn and his replacement with an ideologically flexible placeholder candidate like Owen Smith.

Misrepresentations

One of the most woeful of Andreou's misrepresentations is his assertion that Corbyn would personally "deselect all dissenters and take full control".

Top-down Kinnockesque witch hunts and expulsions of ideological dissenters are not going to happen under Corbyn's watch. If Corbyn does use his likely re-election to put re-selection of MPs onto the agenda, the people who would make the decision to remove corrupt/complacent/party wrecking/self-serving/right-wing MPs would be local Labour Party members.

If re-selection does materialise, it won't be Corbyn taking "full control" of the party for himself, it would be Corbyn handing an awful lot more control over the direction of the party to the people who make up the party membership.

It's a complete liberty for Andreou to make honesty and truth central themes of his article, but to dishonestly characterise Corbyn's democratisation of the party as a dictatorial power grab.

Not only is Andreou dishonestly misrepresenting the situation, he's also dishonestly misrepresenting his own commentary as being an honest appraisal. The dual nature of Andreou's dishonesty warrants the coining of the term "meta-dishonesty" to describe it.

An unwarranted attack on Podemos

Towards the end of the article Andreou really begins to lose the plot and allow his true anti-democratic agenda to shine through. At one point he tries to illustrate his claim that mass political participation is unworkable by citing an article in the Rupert Murdoch operated Times slagging off the Spanish left-wing anti-austerity party Podemos.

What Andreou fails to mention is that Podemos was only founded in March 2014, meaning that in just over two years they've gone from nothing to being the third largest political party in Spain with above 20% of the vote (just a whisker behind the second party) and winning the mayoral elections in both Madrid and Barcelona.

Imagine if a brand new political party took 20% of the vote in the UK and their candidates became the mayors of London and Edinburgh. Do you think anyone in their right mind elsewhere in Europe would be trying to write that off as a spectacular failure to score political points against a local politician they're waging a vendetta against?

Interestingly, as a self-proclaimed expert on Greek politics Andreou fails to make a much more telling comparison between Labour and the once powerful Greek socialist party PASOK.

PASOK made the mistake of embracing right-wing austerity economics and slumped from never receiving less than 38% of the vote between 1981 and 2011 to taking just 4.7% of the vote in 2015 and ending up as Greece's 7th party!

Instead of trying to paint the remarkable rise of Podemos in Spain as some kind of desperate failure, maybe it would have been more useful for Andreou to point out a real political catastrophe that actually happened, and explain how traditional left-wing parties peddling hard-right economics are playing on extremely dangerous political thin ice?

Participation vs Managerialism

It begins showing from around the middle of the article, but toward the end Andreou really starts losing the ability to hide his true agenda. The absurd attack on Podemos in order to try to discredit the concept of mass political participation is bad enough, but in his concluding remarks he demonstrates his true anti-democratic sentiments by describing the massive number of people inspired by Corbyn to become Labour Party members as an "army" that will inevitably become "an instrument of violence".

Andreou is clearly afraid of mass political participation. He's scared of the idea of allowing ordinary plebs to have any real influence over the political system. He's terrified of participatory democracy, so he's smearing the people who want to get involved as part of a violent mob.

Andreou obviously prefers the managerialist style of politics where an insulated political elite get to make the important political decisions and the lower orders are kept as far away from the political process as possible.

What seems to have passed him by is that the slick managerialist style of Tony Blair led us into the Iraq catastrophe that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, caused a huge refugee crisis and triggered a wave of sectarian violence that eventually culminated in the rise of ISIS. If the millions who protested against the Iraq invasion would have actually had some kind of democratic political mechanism to influence the managerialist political establishment, then perhaps all of that violence, and death, and suffering, and bloodshed, and misery could have been averted ...

But no ... In Andreou's version of reality the Westminster political establishment (you know, the ones who just wrote a blank cheque to renew Britain's stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction and are still allowing British corporations to sell arms to the disgusting Islamist Saudi Arabian regime) are the peacemakers, and the people who want to reform politics to make them more accountable to the British public are the loathsome violent threat that you should be afraid of.

Utter contempt for democracy

Andreou's article is riddled with confused logic, misrepresentations and outright hypocrisy but his contempt for democracy is the one thing that shines through the most strongly at the end.

He spends the article wildly generalising about how intolerant the so-called far-left are, insisting that Corbyn and his supporters are a far-left fringe who are "obsessed with purging it [the country] from anyone who thinks different" and then later in the article he says that "Corbyn must be ousted at all costs. Everything else can be fixed later".

The contrast really couldn't be starker. He's smearing Corbyn supporters for supposedly wanting to conduct an ideological purge, then insists that no matter what the outcome of the leadership election Corbyn and his supporters should be purged from the party at any cost!

Screw what the membership want. Screw the concept of participatory democracy. What Andreou wants is an ideological purge of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, and he openly admits that he doesn't care how much damage to the Labour Party it takes to achieve it. 

And most delusional of all he genuinely seems to think that a return to the orthodox old-fashioned managerialist style of doing politics will enough to undo the damage inflicted by the "destroy Corbyn and drive away his supporters at any cost" brigade.

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