Fake Retrospectives

Going by the mainstream media, now is the time when we should be reviewing the year past, revisiting the stories of the past twelve months.  In the case of much of the media this is pretty pointless as, to be frank, they basically make up much of what they print.  Or at the very least 'embellish' the story in order to make it fit their particular prejudices.  Their recent reporting of the Boxing Day sales reinforced my conviction that they write many stories about this sort of event in advance and simply disregard the actual facts.  They were reporting on Boxing Day itself that sales were disastrously down and it was all the Labour government's fault.  Except that, according to later reports, a surge in sales later in the day resulted in higher overall sales than in 2024.  Not that most of them bothered either amending their original reports or putting that out as a new story.  Like I said - they just don't care about actual facts, especially if they contradict their pre-existing prejudices.  Which means that their retrospective reviews of the year are utterly meaningless, unless they present them as reviews of the best lies they've printed over the past twelve months.  You'll excuse my cynicism, but after watching the UK's dismal performance over the past year, it is difficult to feel anything else.  The only consolation I take from it all is that the traditional media in the UK - the right-wing press, talk radio and that gaggle of neo-Nazi TV 'news' stations - are becoming less and less relevant, with fewer and fewer people reading, listening or watching them.  The bad news, though, is that more and more people seem to be getting their 'news' from the web - and not from actual news sites, but from unchecked social media accounts.

With the apparent decline in the critical faculties of the population - who now seem to unquestioningly swallow everything that some 'influencer' (who can be any sketchy character with a YouTube channel, TikTok or Twitter account), tells them.  Which, of course, is the other side of the coin, the 'dumbing down' of state education to ensure that the young are never taught any form of critical thinking in the first place.  This is particularly blatant in Trump's America, where the dismantling of public education is a central plank of the administration's crusade to eliminate the possibility of being any competing view point which might challenge the orthodoxy of 'Trumpism'.  But you can see it happening elsewhere - we had fourteen years of right-wing Tory governments here in the UK doing their best to undermine education's role in teaching students to think for themselves and question orthodoxy, after all.  It's an old, old story - the twisting of education into a form of indoctrination in order to reinforce and perpetuate the tenets of the ruling regime.  In the past, it was characteristic of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, but it is a policy which has gradually seeped into supposedly liberal and democratic regimes.  As ever, the US has been a leader in this - American education during the Cold War focused on indoctrinating young America into the idea that rapacious capitalism was the only legitimate form of economic activity, that, if left to flourish unencumbered by regulation, the market could provide citizens with all their needs: adequate housing, education, healthcare and so on.  Not so much the vaunted 'American Dream' as the 'American Fantasy'.  But, as ever, I have digressed.  As you've doubtless gleaned, I'm not going to be presenting any retrospectives of the past year either here, or over at The Sleaze.  Instead, as the New Year approaches, I've determined to look resolutely to the future and hope that we can make it better than the past year.