Light at the end of the lockdown tunnel

Sunday was a great day.

(Nearly) summertime and the living is easing

It wrapped up week 6 of our lockdown here in Spain and, boy, it’s been (and still is) a tough lockdown. People not absolutely obliged to travel to work are only allowed out to go the shops, the banks, a pharmacy, a healthcare centre or (it may just be me, but I find this amusing) to the newsagent to get a newspaper. Could this be the triumph of the much-maligned Mainstream Media? Of those institutions Trump denounces as purveyors as fake news? Here they have special status.

There are a few exceptions to the lockdown rules. We, by sheer good luck, fall into one of them: dog owners are allowed to walk their dogs, though only close to home. But what exactly is ‘close’? At one time, the suggestion was just 50 metres but, outside the cities, there is slightly more leeway in the definition.

In a spirit of complete compliance with the strict letter of the regulations, I can firmly state that we never go far.

And in strict compliance with the spirit of the regulations, we never meet anyone anyway, so we’re exposing neither ourselves nor them to any risk.

Besides, the smaller dog – Toffee – has developed a certain indolence recently. Since we’re only allowed to walk on the streets, and not in the woods, and she doesn’t like the streets, she’s more than capable of lying down suddenly at the end of her lead – we’re not allowed to take them off the lead – and making it quite clear that she intends to go no further.

That really can happen within 50 metres of home.

The option then is to head back or carry her. And, small though she is, I certainly do not enjoy carrying her far. That too helps to keep the definition of ‘close’ to within pretty tight bounds.

The only people allowed out under any of these arrangements were, in any case, adults or kids of 14 or over. The only exception were children with a single parent or carer: when the adult went out, the kids necessarily went with them. But all other kids were stuck indoors. Which is pretty soul-destroying if you think that the lockdown was just coming up to the end of six weeks.

Lovely weather AND the kids are out again

That’s what made Sunday so great. The Spanish government decided that the downward trend in numbers of Coronavirus cases and, above all, of deaths was sufficient to allow a little slackening of the rules. And the big deal was that kids up to 14 would now be able to go out, for an hour a day, to play as they wished, with no particular destination in mind. They could take toys, scooters, skates or even bikes. A single adult could accompany them, taking care of up to three kids.

What made things even better was that the weather had just turned glorious. To me, still retaining British criteria, it felt like summer, with temperatures in the mid-twenties (OK, OK, high seventies if you insist on using that old-fashioned Fahrenheit). No one from around here would call that summery, of course. They’d just say, “just you wait. You’ll see what real summer is like. You’ll be regretting the rain.” And I know they’re right: we were here last summer. Even so, Sunday felt good and raised my spirits, for both the weather and the unusual sight of families out walking.

People did cheat a bit. There were a lot of family groups out, with what looked distinctly like two parents with the kids. And at times different families met up and chatted, not always, as far as I could tell, respecting social-distancing requirements.

In our local city, Valencia, things were worse. The council, unlike its opposite numbers in Madrid, decided to reopen the parks for the first time. A flood of humanity descended into them. The police were nice, though. They announced in the evening that they’d gone round that day telling people what they should be doing and, above all, what they shouldn’t, without fining anyone. But that was a one-off ‘pedagogical experience’. From Monday on, it would be fines again. And they’re not cheap here.

The weekdays have seen a return to something more orderly. People are still out, and the weather’s still good, but social distancing has become the norm again.

Now we’re waiting for the next step. The Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has said that the exit from the lockdown will take up to eight weeks, until the end of June. That’ll make 14 weeks in all, which sounds a bit right: Wuhan in China is approaching three months.

The exit will happen in steps, making it a lockdown stepdown, I suppose. The stages will be timed differently in different regions. The first step, however, has already been announced. As of the coming Saturday, we adults will also be allowed out, for the first time since the whole business started, for an hour’s exercise or walking a day. And we don’t even have to go out alone but can walk with others from our household. In my case, that means that I can enjoy Danielle’s company, though if our cat Misty wants to join us, I dare say we won’t object to his coming along too.

That’s subject to things continuing to go well. But yesterday saw the lowest number of new cases registered since the lockdown began, so I’m feeling a little optimistic.

There could be light at the end of this particular tunnel.

The Skwawkbox, or master class in writing fake news

“The TV News is lying to us. I get my information from Facebook, friends and social networks.”

An interesting comment. Many people in the England, the US or other nations might well share the sentiment. In this instance, it came from Spain.

It could also have come from the left as plausibly as the right. The BBC has been upset by the attacks on it from the left, just when its very existence is coming under threat from a right-wing government. We might soon see a great public broadcaster muzzled by the right while the left does nothing to defend it.

In this case, the speaker was from the right. He was a supporter of the far-right Spanish party, Vox. The left-leaning paper El País was interviewing him for a study of where Vox gets its support.

He prefers to get his news from Facebook, his friends and social networks. Which is another way of saying that what he wants isn’t information, it’s confirmation. He will find those groups and posts, or friends, who believe what he believes, and always strengthen rather than challenge his views.

That’s much more comfortable. It’s also how fake news spreads. That’s true whether the fake news is generated by a propaganda mouthpiece of the right, such as Guido Fawkes in the UK or the White House in the US, or the left, such as England’s Skwawkbox.

Purveyors of fake news
A rare photo of publicity-shy Skwawkbox founder Steve Walker (l)
Paul Staines of Guidow Fawkes (c) and the White House ranter

In answering a recent FaceBook comment of mine, a critic pointed me to a link to a Skwawkbox page which had the headline:

EXCL: NCC FORCED TO REJECT UP TO 90% OF ANTISEMITISM EVIDENCE AS UNFIT – MULTIPLE DEATHS FOLLOW EXPULSIONS

The claim, right at the start of the headline, to exclusivity is clearly a source of pride to the writer. To me, it just says, ‘no reputable journalist has picked up this story’. Clearly, the poster of the link was, however, entirely disinclined to wonder about the item’s reliability.

The story itself opens with:

A Manchester woman has died within days of her expulsion from the Labour Party under a new disciplinary system.

The woman, whose identity has been confirmed to the SKWAWKBOX, is understood to have died on Tuesday as a result of a brain haemorrhage that locals are linking to stress brought on by her summary expulsion under a new ‘fast track’ process in which the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) is expelling members against whom antisemitism complaints have been made.

It seems the person who pointed me to this piece had confidence in it. But all it’s saying is that someone, unnamed to us though the Skwawkbox claims to know who she is, is said by some anonymous source and their equally unnamed friends, to have died within days of being expelled from the Labour Party.

Given the headline with its reference of the lack of validity of ‘90% of Antisemitism evidence’, the implication is that the evidence against this woman was weak.

However, we can check none of this. We don’t know the name of the woman. We don’t know the names of the people living locally who commented on her death. We don’t know what evidence was brought against her, let alone whether any proportion of it, or none at all, was deemed invalid.

In fact, we don’t know whether the 90% figure is accurate. Any more than we know whether evidence rejected by the disciplinary bodies of the Labour Party ought in fact to have been admitted.

The piece is written in such a way that it’s impossible to verify any of its allegations. It may be that I’m too cynical, but I believe that anyone who makes claims that can’t be verified, is afraid of any kind of questioning. That’s likely to be because they’re afraid the case will fall apart if it’s examined too closely.

The naivety of certain commentators, such as my critic, lies in the refusal to see this obvious truth.

As a result, I thought the best response was to write a piece of my own, applying exactly the same journalistic standards as the Skwawkbox.

A reliable source leads me to understand that the woman who died in Manchester soon after being expelled from the Labour Party, had faced multiple charges of antisemitism backed by overwhelming evidence.

While a proportion of the evidence submitted was found to be too circumstantial or too weak, more than enough was both conclusive and believable, in many cases confirmed by multiple, independent sources.

Her death soon after the expulsion was a tragic coincidence. 

The same source confirms that the woman had a serious and long-term circulatory condition which was both inoperable and likely to lead to life-threatening trauma if triggered by, say, an external shock. My source confirms that she had such a shock, unrelated to the expulsion, before suffering a massive and tragically fatal aneurysm.

My heartfelt sympathy goes to the woman’s loved ones in this terrible moment for them. However, it has to be stressed that her death, while tragic, was not associated with the disciplinary action Labour had taken against her. Her expulsion was inevitable, given the incontrovertible evidence that she made antisemitic statements, repeatedly, over a long period.

There is no place for anti-Semites in the Labour Party.

Now here’s your challenge: prove that any of what I’ve said is untrue.

Shoot the messenger

It’s wonderful to see Donald Trump firing three of the five polling organisations he previously had working for his re-election campaign.

Even more wonderful is the reason why: he was responding to leaked internal polls which showed him behind some potential Democratic opponents and way behind some others.

Bring me the news I want to hear or fear the consequences

That’s naturally immensely gratifying in itself. We’re still a long way out, of course, but the lower Trump’s starting point in his battle for re-election, the less likely he is to close the gap, and the better that is for all of us. That’s all of us including the majority of his own supporters, incidentally: the poor and left-behind who allowed themselves to be deluded into believing that he would do something for them.

It’s also a real pleasure to see Trump responding this way. He doesn’t like the message, so he shoots the messenger. And declares:

We are winning in every single state that we’ve polled. We’re winning in Texas very big. We’re winning in Ohio very big. We’re winning in Florida very big.

The evidence is neither here nor there, what matters is what he believes.

This, as I mentioned last time, is the way Fake News works. You present things the way you want them to be, and then you believe it, because it’s what you want to swallow. Ironically, that doesn’t stop Trump – inevitably – denouncing any news he doesn’t like as fake news. He made that clear in a tweet:

The Fake (Corrupt) News Media said they had a leak into polling done by my campaign which, by the way and despite the phony and never ending Witch Hunt, are the best numbers WE have ever had. They reported Fake numbers that they made up & don’t even exist. WE WILL WIN AGAIN!

The numbers his own pollsters gave him had to be wrong, because they didn’t support his conviction, true because he wishes it so, that HE WILL WIN AGAIN!

Well, he might win again. But for the moment at least, the omens are against him. Those who prefer evidence over belief have to wonder whether his victory is quite as assured as he claims.

Especially as the evidence came from people he had himself employed to reinforce his wishful thinking. He must think it extraordinary that they reached the opposite conclusion. That’s nothing short of treason, a word he’s keen to throw at others while trying to duck the accusation himself. And at the very least, it represents a failure to deliver what was required.

It’s only a wonder he kept two of the organisations on and fired only three of them.

Fake news and 'The Truth'

Terry Pratchett was one of the finest English writers of recent years. That’s not as widely understood as it might be, perhaps because he wrote fantasy novels and too few people realise that they are, in reality, not concerned with his invented ‘Discworld’ but with our own life here on Earth, to which he held up a revealing mirror. Or a searchlight.

Terry Pratchett: excellent writer whose insight we sadly miss

The Guardian recently published an article on the Pratchett biography due to be released next year by Marc Burrows. He discovered that Pratchett, who started his professional career as a journalist, conducted an interview in 1995 with Bill Gates of Microsoft. Pratchett correctly foresaw the arrival of fake news; Gates mistakenly countered that there would be an authority on the net which would classify material and allow readers quickly to establish that certain items were simply untrue. How wrong that was…

Pratchett had said:

Let’s say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the second world war and the Holocaust didn’t happen. And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review and so on. There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It’s all there: there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.

Lisa Forbes, newly-elected MP for Peterborough
Confused about the anti-Semitism of posts she decided to like

It’s ironic that he chose an instance of anti-Semitism to illustrate his point. Today, we see a great deal of anti-Semitic material on the internet, masquerading as anti-Zionism, and plenty of people are empty-headed enough to endorse it unthinkingly. That’s what Lisa Forbes did, before becoming the new Labour MP for Peterborough in its recent by-election. But there’s Islamophobic material out there, and anti-vax material, as well as stuff about conspiracy theories concerning 9/11, the moon landing or pretty much anything else you care to mention, so that the right can fall for it just as readily as the left or the simply naïve.

Pratchett also wrote a novel to explore these problems, aptly entitled The Truth. It focuses on William de Worde who launches the Discworld’s first daily newspaper, the Ankh-Morpork Times. As William comes to grips with his new profession of journalism, he begins to discover some of its more curious aspects.

In the Palace of Ankh Morpork, William attempts to collect information about an offence alleged to have been committed there. But the Commander of the Watch (the Chief of Police), Sam Vimes, refuses to tell him anything useful. However, when William needs something from the kitchens, Vimes is at least good enough to point him in the direction. William decides to poke around there, until he’s challenged.

‘… who are you, askin’ me questions?’

‘Commander Vimes sent me down here,’ said William. He was appalled at the ease with which the truth turned into something that was almost a lie just by being positioned correctly.

He’s absolutely right. Nothing helps a lie gather momentum so much as having it transmitted through a statement that is strictly true. Vimes did indeed send him that way. But Vimes gave him no permission to interview anyone or, indeed, continue his investigation of a crime on which the police were working. And yet, isn’t that exactly the impression William’s words give?

The problem, in William’s view, is summed by an old saying about lies and the truth: ‘…lies could run round the world before the truth could get its boots on.’ But what gives that statement its power is the thought with which he follows it up:

And it was amazing how people wanted to believe them.

Here’s a lovely example of both these notions: that a dash of truth makes fake news more palatable, and that it will be more quickly accepted and spread by people who want it to be true.

In the recent Peterborough by-election I mentioned before, Labour surprised most commentators by holding the seat. Many had expected it to be won by Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. For Labour to hold it after the previous MP, also Labour, had been forced out following criminal action, was remarkable. And many remarked on it. One such remark I saw on social media, claimed that it was a great success, especially as Labour not only held the seat but increased its majority.

Clearly, the writer really wanted to believe in a Labour triumph in the seat. And since the candidate had indeed increased the majority, the justification for this belief might seem solid. Until we look at more evidence. A little more truth, in fact.

The Labour majority at the previous election had been 607 votes. At the by-election the majority had climbed to 683. So it’s perfectly true that it had increased. But it had increased from a wafer-thin majority, by a wafer-thin amount, to another wafer-thin majority.

And what triumphalism over the election result doesn’t take into account is that Labour’s share of the vote fell, and by a far from wafer-thin amount: from 48.1% to 30.9%, a drop of 17.2%.

Indeed, taken together, the vote of the right-wing parties – Conservatives and the new Brexit party – took 50.3% of the votes, an absolute majority. Labour only won because the right-wing vote was split.

Labour had something to celebrate in holding a difficult seat. But triumphalism? That was hardly called for.

Unless you’re ready to believe a distortion made possible by, as Pratchett shows, positioning the truth in a particular way. Which you’ll be all the happier to do if you just want to believe the lie in the first place.

Just as Pratchett warned.

Fake news and the MSM

Donald Tusk, President of the EU Council, wondered this week about the ‘special place in hell … for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.”

In Dante’s Inferno the deepest circle in hell is reserved for traitors. Sounds about right for people who lure their nation down a road with no idea where it leads.

There was, inevitably, an outcry in response to Tusk’s comments. But an EU source confirmed that he stood by his words. “He remains of the view that while the truth may be more painful, it is always more useful.”

That’s not just true, it’s far more significant than the “special place in hell” remark it followed. The truth isn’t always comfortable. Indeed, it’s often challenging.

That’s something that needs to be said and repeated . Especially today. There is a spirit in the air that says “only what I want to hear is true”. The spirit is entirely non-partisan, embracing both left and right. Corbynistas in Britain or Trumpists in the US are as eager as each other to denounce the ‘MSM’ (mainstream media) for peddling ‘fake news’. But when you look more closely, you find that what they’re really objecting to is news that makes them uncomfortable.

There is, for instance, an inclination in certain circles of the left to feel that the government of Venezuela deserves unqualified backing because it proclaims itself to be Socialist, and in such circles, merely to make the claim is enough to win support. It isn’t true of everyone. Emily Thornberry, for instance, the Labour Party’s foreign affairs spokesman recently pointed out that, while calling himself a socialist, President Maduro has betrayed every principle of socialism.

Emily Thornberry gave a thoughtful and thought-provoking speech on Venezuela
and, remarkably, the Guardian reported on it fairly and extensively

It was interesting reading the report of her speech, in that MSM outlet the Guardian, which gave it balanced and extensive coverage. For instance, she argued, in my view courageously and convincingly that, for all Maduro’s failings, it was wrong to recognise the legitimacy of the self-proclamation as interim president of his opponent Juan Guaidó:

We need to give them time, and that offer has been made internally and externally. We need to ensure that happens – that is the best way to proceed, rather than to suddenly say: ‘That’s it, we’ve had enough. We recognise X. We do not recognise Y any more.’ It’s not the way to treat another country, even a country in as desperate a situation as Venezuela.

Such good sense and moderation isn’t universal in the Labour Party. Many in Labour still claim that the desperate state of Venezuela is all the fault of US sanctions. They refuse to accept that Venezuela is an oil economy and has faced sanctions for a far shorter time than Cuba, which does at least manage to feed its people and provide them with healthcare.

But these people don’t read MSM papers like the Guardian. Instead, they read outlets like vezenuelaanalysis.com which tell us that what is happening in Venezuela is an attempted coup against Maduro. And what is this source of information? It’s an online paper founded with money from the Venezuelan government and which claims to be supported today entirely by its readers – though we don’t know who those readers are. A recent reposting of a link to one of these stories included the comment “You won’t see this in Western media”. Well, that’s true. And I would hope not. Because the media I read – the Guardian, the Independent, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others who aspire to professional journalism – don’t take their information from sources whose background is unclear, whose standards are unknown, and whose bias is obvious.

But the beauty of this Venezuelan paper is that it tells its readers what they want to read. And to many people that’s what matters today: not to learn from what they read, as I did from Thornberry’s remarks, but to have their faith confirmed. Because they aren’t looking for evidence, they are driven by belief. And that seems to be a deeply ingrained need in many circles today.

Look at the anti-vaxxer movement. It is having some success, with vaccination rates too low in more and more countries. But somehow anti-vaxxers see no connection between those low rates and the rising numbers of infections, and even deaths, from entirely preventable diseases.

We even see believers in a flat Earth growing in numbers, even though in one instance at least, their very attempts to prove their faith depends on systems based on the Earth being round.

There’s a widespread thirst for belief, not knowledge. Independent of evidence.

The other end of the political spectrum is entirely symmetrical. In the US, the National Enquirer is trying to pressurise Jeff Bezos over some compromising texts and images a hacker has passed them. There can be differing views over whether or not Bezos should have sent those messages. What, however, seems clear is that he is being targeted because he’s the owner of the Washington Post or, as Trump calls it, the Amazon Washington Post (Bezos is also the founder of Amazon).

Here’s the Tweet in which Trump reacted to the first announcement of the revelations about Bezos:

So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post. Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!

What doesn’t Trump like about the Washington Post? In the same way as the Maduro fans who can’t cope with Guardian, he hates the fact that the Post sometimes publishes information that isn’t – how shall I put this? – entirely flattering about him.

Both the Maduro supporters and the Trump fans reject the ‘mainstream media’ that sometimes challenges their beliefs with evidence – because those pesky publications insist on standards which involve such boring things as confirmation of sources and careful editing of material for accuracy. That’s not to say they never make mistakes – they certainly do – but it does mean they don’t just spew out propaganda.

No good if you’re flat earther. And the anti-vaxxers, Trump worshippers and Corbyn cult adepts aren’t much different from the flat earthers. Belief trumps information. The truth, as Tusk made clear this week, can sometimes be more painful, and they don’t want that pain.

But the truth’s also much more useful. As I found from Thornbery, in the Guardian this week, when she opened my eyes to another way of seeing things.

A salutary experience which, sadly, the true believers deny themselves.