Admittedly I can’t remember the last time a woman was last angry with me, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t smack her on the bottom and tell her to shut up and make me a martini. Doesn’t work, that kind of thing. I know a man whose wife was cross with him for a reason he felt unwarranted: “Just take those thoughts out that pretty little head and zip it,” he said: a move that cost him the next month on the sofa. During that time his wife started extracting liberties to the point where her next move could — could — have been acquiring a boyfriend of Caribbean extraction. He told me he apologized over 500 times.
Governments should treat the public like women. That is, listen, or make a gallant effort in pretending to. But they don’t. When crowds get cross, governments get cross back, and then because governments can toss people in jail — not the other way round sadly — everyone who was initially cross is cornered into guilty pleas and locked up. That makes them even crosser.
I’ve watched this predictable cycle ad nauseam: equal parts thrilling and sinister. At a protest in Southampton two weeks ago, crowds infuriated with the standard of policing afforded to a young man called Henry Nowak (police were suspected of accelerating his death by stabbing) started throwing wheelie bins at the filth. Not smart, but crowds are generally lively, particularly then, with the circumstances around Nowak’s murder. The following day a forensics vehicle patrolled the street where the action had occurred, treating bystanders to the peculiar sight of latex glove-wearing officers gingerly loading the wheelie bins from the night before into the van.
That was to lift prints. When matches surfaced in the database, parties responsible had their doors broken down at 2am by a dozen riot officers. Once nicked, the parties were ferried off to the station and encouraged to enter guilty pleas. Most have already been jailed.
The UK defends authoritarian reflexes by claiming that rioters have been radicalized by social media, in particular, Elon Musk’s X. Despite no evidence to support the idea that people noted a post to arms on their phones and decided to go berserk, the claim nonetheless is suspected of forming some basis for a new policy draft banning social media platforms for children under the age of 16.
The excuse arc here has volunteered child suicide and bullying, the two most compelling forces for a decision of this nature, then time and concentration management, which effectively lifts kids from the custody of parents and makes them wards of the state. Had the ban enthusiasts stuck to the safety issue, there would have been a more convinced reception, but they haven’t, and in their scramble to justify, it appears that if one of the ban’s extensions is a database of who is watching or reading or posting, well, that’ll be just fine, thank you.
They’d like to know all that. Since Musk dismantled much of the censorship architecture on the microblogging platform, elected officials have been fair game, or more constructively, performance managed. Direct accountability has incensed them, but as usual, they have things the wrong way round. Talk about being ungrateful. If anything, they should consider themselves lucky the platform wasn’t around when hundreds of politicians from all UK parties were exposed for cheating in their expense claims in 2009. I think X would have had a few things to say about that guy Richard — a cabinet secretary’s husband — who tried to claim expenses for porn (“mature housewives from Newcastle”), or plastic bath ducks.
The real strength of X, four years into its new ownership, is that it is stripping certain powers from language. Previously, editors and politicians could use Twitter to call everyone and everything that didn’t agree with “racist”, then lobby for their banning. As that no longer works, claims of racism need to be scrutinized or litigated. Unsurprisingly, most of the time what emerges next is that the party accused was in fact not racist, prompting the accuser to be deluged with abuse. Exactly what people who behave like this deserve.
This kind of forum just won’t do, for today’s establishment. Ministers and internet Karens alike claim the Australian model of social media instituted in January this year has been nothing but a success. In reality, the once cottage industry of virtual private networks (VPNs) there has boomed into a pattern of political resistance. Sensing that the same may occur in the UK, Keir Starmer is thought to be considering a ban on VPNs, ignoring the potential casualties including roughly one-third of small businesses who use them for remote work.
Seeing the UK social media ban in isolation is a mistake. The leadership style and purpose of some western states is getting hard to figure out. But whatever they are doing, their tolerance for dissent is spent. For years they held a monopoly on the strength of language, expecting the public to take on the chin being called bigots.
But push a woman too much and find out. I’m not talking about Gen Z girl bosses making TikToks at work. Instead, there’s that white-hot rage that can be switched on in a moment, like the sequence of Lorena Bobbit waking up, charging into the kitchen, finding a suitable instrument then walking back to the room to castrate her husband John Wayne as he slept. Alas, the monster at the end of our mad dream.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/number10gov/4581073867]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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