Moobs

From almost my first moment connected to the internet I have been arguing with people online; first on Cix and Compuserve, then in the comments sections of blogs, now on Twitter. So many hours I could have spent appreciating fine art or cataloguing the unpasteurised cheeses of rural Norway have been poured away wrangling with fools and weasels. Everyone appreciates that online disputation has its own peculiar character. Most commentators have focused on the additional heat that anonymity and/or being out of range of a good smack in the chops allows. I want, instead, to focus on weasely forms of argument which, whilst not unique to online battles, seem unhappily prevalent. My aim is to help you recognise when debate has degraded to a state where even the minuscule prospect of constructive engagement has vanished and you should move on.

**Enter the Weasel**

Imagine you hear that the Big Endian Army has committed a terrible atrocity. You post a message deploring it. Immediately there will appear someone apparently anxious for your views on the wrongdoing of the Little Endian armed forces. Well, hello there Mr Weasel. How their intervention is formulated depends on their manners or mood. All of the following forms are commonplace and all carry the same implication (made explicit in the last form). In ascending order of unpleasantness:

(1) But what do you say about the Little Endian massacre?

(2) I notice you have not condemned the Little Endian massacre.

(3) How can you complain about the Big Endian massacre unless you also complain about the Little Endian massacre?

(4) Shut up Little Endian scum! You are no better than those savages that pulled the trigger during the Little Endian massacre.

If they can resist the unhinged personal attack, your new friend will be posing as a wandering umpire of the internet, drifting from debate to debate striving to nurture balance and fair play. The implication is that you are not, in truth, a humanitarian moved by an atrocity but rather a partisan laying claim to scruples you do not actually have. Of course, if you take the time to look at what your new friend has been saying elsewhere online it will soon be clear that there is a distinct pattern to their interventions. Criticism of the Big Endians seems to summon them like a dog whistle. The argument described above is the favoured weapon of the apologist. However it may be formulated, the intervention always resolves to their trying to get you to shut up. That proposition can be easily tested.

What if you try to refute the implication that you are partisan by pointing to a passionate denunciation of the Little Endian actions that you had posted just hours previously? That should, in theory, elicit an immediate apology from Senor Weasel. It will not do so. Instead what will happen is that the sincerity of your denunciation will be doubted and then out will flop the preposterous kernel of the weasel’s argument: “If you accept that the Little Endians committed an atrocity you cannot complain about the Big Endian atrocity”. To which one might reasonably respond “Why, in the name of Satan’s underpants, not?” Why can I not simply be opposed to atrocities? For the weasel now is the time to get personal.

**You stink**

For reasons that the weasel cannot fathom, you have failed to shut up. They have obviously been too subtle. What happens next depends on whether there is a mob handy. If there is, hundreds of weasely partisans turn up on your webpage or in your timeline and one after the other ask you why you have not condemned the Little Endian massacre. It is like a DDOS attack on your typing skills. The idea is that you should be overwhelmed, recognise that it is getting out of hand and, finally, **SHUT UP**.

If there is no mob, or if your multi-threaded repetitive argument skills are at ninja level, you will be told that you are Anti-Bigendic or Bigendaphobic or failing to check your privilege sufficiently often or carefully. Of course you don’t want to be thought of as a Bigendaphobe. You are a hand-wringing humanitarian after all. So perhaps, the weasel hopes, you will head for the door rather than risk a public debate as to whether you are a bigot. What point denying the charge? Isn’t that what Bigendaphobes always do (“I’m not Bigendaphobic but …”)? Some of your best friends are Big Endians … but now you come to think of it, wouldn’t saying so ring awfully hollow? However, even if you stay and fight, the weasel will be smirking because the debate must now take the form of you trying to demonstrate your lack of prejudice to the weasel’s satisfaction which, of course, is an impossible task. Long before that point is reached the lure of Nordic cheese should have drawn you away to more useful pursuits.

None of which is to say there is not a little weasel in all of us or that online debate is invariably pointless. Away from the echo chambers and drive-by weasel hits you can, if you are careful to keep company with people with perspectives different to your own, use the internet as a tool for helping you confound your prejudices, inform your opinions and, every so often, change your mind.

I married into a Scottish family. From the outset they fed me haggis and bought me tartan clothing apparently in an effort to … well, to “tartanwash” me. Our politics differed. I was left-wing, they were assuredly not. Bit by bit Scotland came to feel ever more like home and, of course, I have come to care about the future on offer to my Scottish family. What this has meant is that for a long while I have had some skin in the Independence game.

I have never made any secret of my dislike of nationalism – not Scottish nationalism in particular, but all nationalisms. They are machines fuelled by a sentimental and, I feel, delusional belief that one’s “people” are different and special and a concomitant hostility to “the other”.

My Scottish nationalist friends told me that their nationalism was different; that it was uplifting and hostility-free (which has not always been my own personal experience) and that they would be delighted if the English were to embrace their own nationhood with similar fervour. I could not tell if they really were enthusiasts for English nationalism. I certainly wasn’t for reasons that I save for some later day.

To test the proposition that they might welcome a rampant English nationalism, I ran a thought experiment. What if the Scots decided that remaining in the Union was where their interests truly lay (as well they might on Thursday) but an upswing in English nationalist fervour led to the rUK deciding that:

1. Self-determination by individual countries was better than union;

2. The English would be better off financially if they were rid of the Scots;

3. The English were specially virtuous and concerned with issues of social justice that the Scots just couldn’t be trusted to care about;

4. Any adverse consequences for Scotland arising from the English pushing them out of the Union were their problem; and

5. The Scots should keep quiet whilst the English made up their minds?

Would my nationalist friends have been saying “Good on you! This is what we hoped for! We are exhilirated by the sight of the mighty English people relentlessly pursuing their own best interests”? Perhaps, but, to be frank, I doubt it. By far the more likely result would be that the Scots would bitterly resent the exercise.

The reason why that conclusion matters to me is that I would expect the same reaction here. There is no doubt the English want the Scots to stay (http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/scottish-independence-referendum-new-poll-4244149). But what if they go?

The Yes campaign have been saying that the English do not properly understand the Scots but that once they are “free” from us and our disappointing tory-voting, scots-oppressing ways we’ll all be great pals. Whatever we may presently be saying we will agree to a currency union and we will not at all resent fiscal measures designed to hoover jobs northwards. I fear that means that they do not properly understand the English.

Until now the only thing which has mattered is how the Scots feel. If they opt for independence then the picture changes. The question then will be how will the English react if the process causes an economic shock? Will their equanimity survive being threatened with a debt renunciation? Perhaps. Perhaps, but I doubt it. It is worth noting that whilst 81% of English and Welsh voters want the Scots to remain in the Union, at the same time 61% of them are opposed to a currency union (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/sep/15/independent-scotland-not-use-pound-english-welsh-voters). That may be, as Mr Salmond puts it, the “sovereign will” of the Scottish people, but it requires the agreement of the English and Welsh people.

In Trafalgar Square last night one speaker said “I don’t want to compete with the Scottish, I want to co-operate with them.” But if competition is what the Scots choose and if nationalism is forced upon the English by default, the English would not only be entitled but, I suspect, will actively want to make sure that their own best interests are preserved. I view this prospect with horror. It is grist to the UKIP mill. This may be the biggest unintended consequence of all. Independence will not magically dis-integrate the Scots economy from that of the rUK. New markets will not instantly appear that will immediately reduce Scottish dependence on trade with the rUK (https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/209891/13-635-scotland-analysis-business-and-microeconomic-framework.pdf). The Scottish economy will, therefore, be strongly affected for the foreseeable future by rUK politics. Independence will mean that Scots lose any say at Westminster whilst the supposedly longed for parallel rise in English nationalism will leave the English in no mood to adapt decisions for the benefit of Scotland.

My friend Jonathan Chamberlain said recently: “It will be awful”. I fear he is right.

I am sat in my home office, thinking. Thinking about my death. I am not fearful. That is not because I can sense the warmth of heaven’s light just beyond the veil. I’m not sure why it is. When I was in my twenties the thought of death would sometimes chase away sleep. I’d lie restless with panic at the thought of annihilation. What scared me was not nothingness but the thought of the world simply carrying on without me being there to see it. It was not that my ego required the sun not to rise, I was desperate to be part of existence. In my twenties, life was a thing of the future. The thought of my life being a thing of the past staggered me.

Why am I not scared now? Perhaps because the future belongs to my children. Throughout my life my back has strained and cracked as I have dragged with me the knot and tangle of my childhood. My father’s death snagged and tore away some of that. Now, I worry, I am weighing my daughters down with my expectations, imperfections and frustrations. It’s right that we slip overboard and fall into the wake.

As I look around me, I find myself thinking that I have a lot of possessions. A lot of what is on my shelves has sentimental value, but only to me. I have been building a museum of me where I am both the curator and the only possible visitor. It’s not because I want to be “remembered”. It is, I am amazed to realise, that I have been planning a time when I will conscientiously remember myself. I have books I will never re-read and whose contents I have forgotten, but which I have, sub-consciously, imagined I would one day take from the shelf in the hope of finding a piece of myself, a memory of a time (even if only a moment), inside it. I have a copy of every edition of the law book I have edited. I have the weak excuse that I may need to know how the law stood in a particular year, but they are really exhibits in the dusty cabinet of auto-curiosity.

In such years as are left to come to me, I would like to be an explorer and not a collector.