‘My name Pan Chou Vya, please read. While losing all my money in Seville last week after being mugged, I wonders if perhaps your good lady disappointed with the size of your thing, but if not then my associates in Nigeria can offer you US$10,000,0000,00000,0000000 of inheritance money if you help us dig up biggest diamond on the planet to also please your woman, much like she will love new zero-light-emitting solar garden lights for which the selling agency in Bolivia is offered and also did you get my last email darling?’
I get about six or seven messages like this a day, and no – please – I don’t want lots of threads about how to be free from spam: free from spam is an impossibility on the Web now. Anyway, I’m making a wider point here. The fact is that what the Internet does today, society tends to do tomorrow.
Nowhere in 2013 is mendacity, fraud, cheating and porn more widespread than on the Web. From the ISPs who ridiculously insist they can do nothing about spam to the search engines and phonecos who say they want to hear from us, everything is a gross misrepresentation of reality. ‘Free’ on the internet means ‘free until you want something more than the foreplay’. ‘You have been selected’ means ‘you are today’s mark’. A few months later, the near-perfect congruence between ‘No-strings free trial’ on a mail site and “I have done nothing wrong” from Jeremy Hunt in the House of Commons becomes sickeningly apparent.
Those who insist we are inventing the crumbling morality of the present are unwilling to engage on such specifics. Just as with New Labour before them, the ConDemned Coalition airily dismisses misbehaviour in public office as the normal rub of the green. But those with a brain know it’s bollocks. The only time I ever heard Tony Blair unconsciously tie himself in knots was when he said, “Everything is getting better and very much the same as it always has been”. He might just as well have said, “I’m the same villain as Baldwin was, except I make him look like an amateur and, er, he was batting for the other side”. Thinkers are not exactly impressed by the doubletalk.
Sometimes, the crossover from virtual to physical takes human form. Grant Shapps is a man who made his money running a string of spam websites under a false name, the best known of which was Michael Green. The idea that even 30 years ago he could’ve been appointed Conservative Party Treasurer is ridiculous…but there he is today. And as you’d expect, he’s continuing to lie about Government policies now that he is part of that Government: according to the New Statesman, “Between March 2011 and May 2012, just 19,700 (somewhat short of Shapps’s “nearly a million”) abandoned their claims prior to a work capability assessment in the period to May 2012″. As Hitler’s propaganda chief Josef Goebbels said, “The Big Lie is always more effective than the half-hearted one”.
But is there any difference between what this brainless twerp Shapps says today, and Gordon Brown was lying about three years ago? Not from my perspective. Each week at PMQs he would blurt out fantasy numbers; almost none of them ever checked out. I watched one Saturday as Brown lied blatantly to the Iraq Inquiry about his support for our soldiers during that illegal war. Illegal war or not, Squaddies deserve total support from the lunatics dumping them in such cauldrons. Brown completely invented the budgets he’d allowed for them – live on national television. Only one MSM hack got in touch after I posted the real Treasury data to say “Well done”.
Here’s another horribly disturbing example: I am indebted to @sam_a_voice for alerting me to the Daily Record’s piece about French con artists Atos – and their somewhat eccentric approach to judging whether people are fit for work. The Government’s own research shows that 55% of people who lost benefits in the crackdown had failed to find work: only 15 % were in jobs, with 30% on other benefits. One can write this off to Wayne Slob idleness, but it’s hard to make that stick given the facts: Citizens Advice Scotland have received 24,000 complaints about Atos, who earn around £110million a year from the taxpayer for working at ‘proving’ people can work.
Atos is really just another G4S – full of bollocks and prepared to pull any stunt in order to reach targets.
Think this piece is becoming biased to the Left? Think again: The Blairites in general and Gordon Brown in particular used the ill-fated PSI to ‘help’ the NHS with renovation. What they actually did was saddle the Health Service with an enormous debt…and the take the debt ‘off balance sheet’ in a manner that would’ve landed Brown in jail had he done such a thing in a plc.
Think this piece is becoming biased to the Right? Think again: the private suppliers who performed PSI work for the NHS have been found in almost every case to have skimped, cut corners, fiddled and under-specced that which they supplied.
Our business and political ethics are, to be blunt, shot to shit. And the very quintessence of this sad reality is to found, rotten to the core, in internet product supply, marketing, and after-sales ‘service’.
There is a very simple reason for this: the Internet is deregulated…except (natch) in those countries where such freedom is disliked by politicians. Just fancy that. In exactly the same way that the regulation of advertising in the UK extends from cigarettes to charities…but not to politics. My oh my, isn’t that amazing?
I find myself baffled when goons like Dan Hannan make this argument about regulation: “The regulators fail to spot criminality, so what we need is deregulation”. It is an argument so idiotic, you have to suspect a near-Nazi level of manipulative agenda: exactly the same, in fact, as that of Tony Blair and ‘Black’ Jack Straw when they told both Parliament and the UN that Saddam Hussein was a real and present WOMD threat to the West. What we need is more street-savvy regulators with commercial prespective and experience – not Abilene before Wild Bill Hickock took over as Marshal.
So people, this is what happens when a new and uncontrolled digital selling medium explodes onto the scene…and leaks out to infect the real world: a sort of Kray Brothers-dominated East End World in which any psychopath can walk into a pub, blow a man’s head off with 37 witnesses, and still evade justice.
Now then, Labour or Conservative: which do you want – ethical anarchy or intelligent, smart regulation? It’s your call. Just don’t hold your breath waiting for either of your ‘Parties’ to deliver on the latter.
The Slog 