Feels Like the first Time.

For the first time in my dim 5 watt memory, it seems that Parliament have actually debated something and come up with a decision.

In previous decades the incumbent party have been so strong that their motions tend to carry with no interference.

The May Government is so weak it had to listen yesterday as the House of Commons actually debated and voted on several amendments and come to a sensible conclusion. And no-one could predict how it would go. This was a proper debate.

Just how the House was designed to work.

All the stupid amendments were defeated and the sensible one (amending or removing the backstop) was carried.

So, Tessie May goes back to Brussels with a clear mandate to sort the backstop issue. Let's see how that goes.

Of course EU representatives were on the news last night and this morning saying the backstop is not up for negotiation. But that's a negotiating standpoint, just like we say we are prepared to leave without a deal.

Somewhere in between those two is where the agreement lies.

I just hope Tessie doesn't slide on some other part of the agreement so we have to go through this whole rigmarole another time. But her negotiating skills seem weak, so she could come back with an even worse deal, who knows.

The New Fascism.

I'm going to go into pretty controversial territory in this thought experiment, so bear with me.

The recent online attacks on free speech have been pretty high profile on the internet, but outside the internet there are other real-life closures of free speech.

On University and College campuses around the country and indeed the Western World students protest and shut down even moderate speakers. Germaine Greer for fuck's sake. Feminist for decades, suddenly she is persona non grata amongst the extremist Social Justice Warriors.

Classic Liberals like Sargon of Akaad have been attacked at speeches they were invited to give in Colleges, by an organisation ironically named Antifa or Anti-Fascists.

Now, if the dogmatic mantra had been restricted to only college campuses, or only certain companies on the internet, or certain political parties, all in isolation, I wouldn't be that bothered. But it's the evidence of this dogma across all of the above that concerns me.

For all of the above to start to promote the same dogma across the board to me at the very least is concerning. If you extrapolate the future of where this is going, it's bloody frightening.

It's also concerning that this left-led crusade is so absolutist. Any dissent must be crushed and destroyed. Any even slightly moderate viewpoints are ground into dust. Anyone not conforming is deplatformed from the internet, expelled from education and made unemployed. They are depersoned and anything less is not good enough for the left-led mob.

This absolutism brings to mind the slogan of the Italian Fascists: "everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state". The degree of extremism is exactly the same. Just replace the words "the state" for "social justice"

The fact that corporations like Patreon, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc. are now depersonning people from the internet does have a whiff of the corporatism of fascist Italy.

The more you delve into the reasons for thing like the Patreon Purge and the removal of payment processing from their competitor SubscribeStar, the more it seems like payment services like MasterCard are pulling the strings.

Why exactly corporations like banks should force pulling the plug on individuals for their online content and refuse to support certain platforms on the internet, I have no idea. But that fact they ARE monitoring online content and making an active contribution to censorship is a worrying development. They are Banks, they supply credit cards, accounts and payment services. Why exactly do they think it's in their remit to monitor people and censor their online output?

It's the remit of our elected representatives to decide on what is criminal, what is beyond the pale. We vote our representatives into office to do our bidding. If they don't we have the opportunity once every 5 years or so to express our displeasure and vote for someone else.

We cannot vote corporations into our out of office. They are unaccountable. They should not be involved in censorship, politics, social justice or any other part of the apparatus we hand to politicians. Corporations should be apolitical. Sure they may fund political campaigns, but this is direct dabbling in an area we reserve for our political representatives.

For corporations to be dabbling directly in political matters deserves intense scrutiny from elected Parliaments across the world.

This ties in directly with Brexit: we voted back in June 2016 you remove ourselves from an unelectable, authoritarian Supranational organisation. We voted to leave the overview of that organisation.

In the past few weeks alone we have heard several corporations putting pressure on politicians to subvert the democratic vote of the people.

We cannot vote directly for the lawmakers of the EU and as they take control over more of our lives such as taxation and force projection, we the people reserve the right to greater representation.

As I've said before this is one of the main bugbears of the EU. We decided in 2016 (as the USA did back with the start of Revolution) that we do not agree with greater taxation or control without more representation or direct accountability. i.e. the ability to vote representatives into the EU commission (the real law-making part of the EU).

But the pressure all around to reduce accountability, usurping elected representatives, moving towards authoritarian or totalitarian rule, the censorship of individuals by unaccountable corporations all backed by a baying, unrelenting mob, to my mind is related and very, very sinister indeed.