I’m going to skip around certain political happenings in a post that doesn’t go anywhere or come to any conclusion. It’s just a wander around some of the things I wanted to say as if they were the unfinished, hardly started notes lying on a desk in no particular order. I may ramble, but as always it’s about truth and falsehood, my favourite subject….

Saying Corbyn, and people do still say this, is for terror, is an unfair extrapolation of the position he takes where he does not support violence in any fashion. Since he does not support the Israeli bombing of Palestine, which is a true statement he does not, those that wish to position him as a sympathiser forget to include that he is not in support of Palestine bombing Israel either, and it is this omission that creates the impression that he is. The man is not in favour of bombing, that is the truth, that does not mean he is in favour of terror, how could he be? So why do so any people continue to act and speak as if he is?

Staying within truthful statements is no guarantee of a complete picture, what is not said allows for imaginings.

When you listen to music, get to know it well, and then create it back vocally or on an instrument, you may experience the phenomenon of extra notes or sequences. This is because your brain has put bits in that were not there in the first place. Everyone plays the G on the 6th string as the first note of Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd, but it’s not the first note it’s not even in the primary sequence, it’s the A on the 5th string that kicks the melody off. That’s how minds work, they extrapolate, they see what is not there, they fill gaps based on suggestions they think they hear that simply do not exist or need to. Psychologists know this well, they use it well. The argument term is non-sequitur, where something does not follow, like when 4% of all immigrants are coming on boats, and all immigrants are less that 2% of all benefit claimants, yet they are mooted as the main driver of economic instability, inequality, and the loss of services, we can say that clearly such a small representative number cannot be the cause of such a widespread issue that dates back to well before they were coming. Even though the right-wing mouthpieces do not actually say it, they have suggested it to you and you have bought it.

Given all the facts about something we can make our on minds up, granted we will of course work from a position of prejudice yes, but we can be swayed. That big lump of meatloaf between your ears is a reasoning engine, it will respond to facts and stats and reasoned argument if you let it. The mainstream media exists in modernity for one reason alone, to turn off your meatloaf, this is what they have been paid to do. When business has interest in media, social media, government sponsorship, the financial world, and the rule of law, then they will leave nothing to chance. What is interesting globally is the torture the US has to put it’s own constitution through to bypass it’s own constitution so that the republican party, lead by a fanatical ego in a bad hairdo, can wring every last bit of human value from the economic output of that nation to put in their already bulging pockets. What we are witnessing on the news is power being abused to control riches, power being inflicted on people so that economic value can be captured.

It is not about ideology, the people putting troops into Chicago obviously have no ideology steering them other than their own greed. The right wing party has demolished rights and the rightful stake in society held by citizens of the nation for no ideological reason, they just want bigger yachts. They say if you’re doing badly look after number one, if you’re doing well then look after everyone else, this is not what we are witnessing across the pond, we are seeing the people with the most collectively punishing the people with the least because they have the least, taking away their healthcare, robbing them of constitutional rights. It has always been so, but not as bad. Though the US constitution stands as maybe the closest thing humans have ever come up with to an unarguable document, one that fulfils the necessary criteria for guiding the building of a better world, it is not perfect. It guarantees a certain liberty to a citizen against actions that could be seen as unjustifiable, but it does not infer a right to look to the state to give to the citizen, it merely frees the citizen from the state. Someone coined the term ‘negative liberty’ to describe this condition. In the 80s Rick Roderick said that we must be aware that government always has the power to curb liberty, it is in the legitimacy of that power where we make the argument against using it, but I think those arguments are going unheard, and that’s the fault of the bought and paid for media.

Leaving important things out is the tactic of those that want to influence the now or history in time. Foucault describes the parts that are left out as a “marginal discourse”, that which would also shape perspective. Get to know what you are not hearing, you may just change your mind…

Paul S Wilson