Carousel propaganda – a new spin on the oldest game
A great post from Heresiarch tonight, ripping into the fantasy world of clots like Julie Bindel and Harriet Harman where evidence-based policy turns out to mean made-up-evidence based policy, and few seem to care
This time it’s the obscene fakery involved in manufacturing an epidemic of “trafficked” women, to sustain Harman’s feminist assault on prostitution, but as I mention in my comments to H’s article, the round-robin generation and regurgitation of statistical lies is not unique to this sphere. Nor is it trivial – this shit took us to war.
The best example in this current whirlwind of bullshit is Denis MacShane’s admission that the figure he came up with and fed to the press as a Home Office estimate, 25,000 women trafficked, was “something he read in the Daily Mirror”. Oh, and where had the Mirror got it? The Home Office. Denis MacShane’s Home Office….
Round and round – in the IT world the equivalent is bootstrapping, which is nowhere near as interesting as it sounds. But in the political/meeja/NGO world there doesn’t appear to be a term for it – so I have invented one and I’m inordinately proud of it. Carousel propaganda© is a plague on democracy. But so long as I get my cut from this point on, I’ll be slightly happier about it…
Tags: adding to the sum of human knowledge, dennis macshane, fake charities, hubris, lies, ngo
21. October 2009 at 9:43 pm :
No No No…You’ve got it all wrong. Fuck the figures. Sunny Hundal’s on the case. Sex trafficking is very real, substantial issue. Don’t bother us with research findings or facts. Thousands of trafficked women are conclusive proof, as though it were needed that his brand of idiot identity politics is the only answer to the problem. Facts and actual numbers are just a remnant of that unenlightened era when rational investigation and statistics led to the Western patriarchal hegemony of ‘reality’. These days, thankfully, emotive subjective truth holds sway…and controls the purse strings. The more ‘subjective’ the better.
Sunny Hundal..the man who put the ‘useful’ into idiot.
http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/10/21/new-credibility-gap-in-sex-trafficking-estimates/#comments
22. October 2009 at 7:19 am :
And wtf do forced marriages have to do with it? Does Sunny’s definition of “trafficked” maybe extend to being forced to go see your Granny on a Sunday afternoon when you’d far rather watch Airwolf?
That Unity article is a pretty fair summation – the comments beneath reveal just how much fantasy and wishful thinking play a role in Leftist “thought”.
22. October 2009 at 8:14 am :
Ooh that’s a great thread – Tim Worstall is eviscerating Sunny….
22. October 2009 at 8:49 am :
Yes excellent stuff at Heresy Corner, including your posts.
22. October 2009 at 9:16 am :
Don’t forget to spend ten glorious minutes seeing MacShane make a complete tit of himself on Newsnight. The interview between him and Nikki Adams of the English Collective of Prostitutes, which was on Tuesday 20 October , is a cracker.
A short report starts at 16:30 in, the interview starts at 21:10, item ends at 27:35.
http://bbc.co.uk/i/njxb2/
22. October 2009 at 5:07 pm :
Fuckin priceless.
Hundal…
“the problem is less with what evidence is presented and more with how it’s framed and what assumptions are made from it, as I said in my response above.”
There is a huge problem…and the evidence for it is the lack of evidence; a certain indication of just how well-organised and brutal the trade is. The traffickers are so cunning and ruthless that they’ve managed to conceal any trace of their existence.
On this basis, I think it’s fair to assume that Sunny could make a cast iron case for…
Alien abductions, the Loch Ness monster, bigfoot, mermaids, effective homeopathy, anything Dan Brown writes, lay lines and, oddly enough a secret cabal of Zionist lizards running the world.
Not forgetting the fairies…especially the one’s he’s away with.
I’d be pissing myself except he seems to be, the Guardian aside, the net’s main cheerleader for idiot policies which respond to convenient fictions touted by interested parties. Interested parties who, by and large, seem to be otherwise unemployable middle-class humanities and social science graduates who’ve stumbled upon the diversity gravy train. It’s killing politics. They’re killing politics.
22. October 2009 at 5:32 pm :
Here’s the little known fact of the week:
Sunny Hundal ‘killed’ multiculturalism.
http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/10/22/how-can-the-left-deal-with-the-bnp/
There’s a thing. Maybe he did a sorta Norman Bates style ‘killing’ and just keeps multiculturalism mouldering away in an armchair at home in a grotesque wig; taliking about it incessantly as though it’s actually there.
22. October 2009 at 6:03 pm :
Facts …theyre just sooo last year/sexist/patriarchal/ ( take your pick of the excuses)missed the rest of the threads about this on cif – did Bindel or Elliot ever come on to defend their (obvious) lies?
22. October 2009 at 6:30 pm :
Even MacShane didn’t attempt to defend himself – by which I mean that he didn’t even try to rebut the accusations against him, and I think that’s because he honestly doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong. That is the problem – people like MacShane, Harriet, Bindel (and Sunny) are so convinced they are right, that petty things like facts, arguments, justifications, just really dont’ bother them. It’s not important. They’re working to a higher truth.
Now, I really dont’ care what the actions of people like this are, I consider the attitude profoundly dangerous. I hope you won’t consider it hyperbolic when I say people like this administered death camps. This is the attitude. A blinkered, obsessive, faith-based ideology that sees one truth and one alone. Terrifying.
2. November 2009 at 11:49 pm :
Frank, I been saying this for years. Without wishing to lapse into argumentum ad hitlerum too far, I see everyday folk around me who would have little problem ‘doing as they are told’ or, like CS Lewis’ observation about do-gooders and robber barons, ‘correct’ us for our own good — all the way. I feel a stranger in my own country and it’s not because of mass immigration (though bollox to that as well).
21. November 2009 at 8:26 am :
Hi Frank
For a couple of years, CiF was where it was at, and it was compelling reading. Doesn’t compel me anymore. Probably due partly to the crass censorship, and partly to an invasion of trolls, once it became clear that it was becoming a forum that mattered. It just became unmanageable reading, when posts were numbering five or six hundred per topic.
So then the time-pressed reader would switch from article-based browsing, to commenter based browsing, to catch up on latest thoughts. And then, the better profiles get banned / switched off, with the entire history gone, and the motivation to visit CiF suddenly vapourised.
I remember making such predictions of reader desertion to Georgina and team when they had an open forum on the topic, but I didn’t myself realise how quickly it would happen, taking CiF out of my daily routine.
I still contribute, but mainly on the Balkans, out of a sense of patriotic duty. What has mainly changed is the time that I spend reading CiF. Once they banned all the interesting views (and effectively, the posters who propound them), then in the main part, what is left isn’t worth reading anymore.
Well done Frank for your own prolific and extraordinary contributions to CiF. You were able to articulate too well, the need for people to think for themselves, which in any hierarchical society, is a heresy.
Back to the topic above, the miracle of having everything available online at the touch of a button is a false promise. The stuff we want to read can be withdrawn at any time. I hope that you saved your own CiF posts Frank, it would be a shame if they were lost.
11. September 2011 at 4:56 pm :
[…] Frank Fisher [45] coined “Carousel Propaganda” last year, but it only caught on with bloggers and pundits this year. It refers to the way media, politicians and activists quote a piece of evidence that has no basis in fact at all; like check-kiting, the funds are non-existent. Brilliant. […]