Cuttings: April 2019

To understand the far right, look to their bookshelves - article by Elif Shafak in The Guardian. "The radical right has seeped into the mainstream. A new breed of populist demagogue has arisen, with no care for facts, reason or data. Yet alongside this has been a silent shift: the emergence of a radical rightwing intelligentsia. With their books and talks they bridge the less-educated groups on the margins and the world of letters. A new publishing trend has emerged, and part of its task is to rewrite history. In 2018, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s memoir Son of the Nation ... sold out [in France] even before it arrived in bookshops. The book was, among other things, an attempt to rewrite the past, particularly the Vichy era. Nazi sympathisers in the Vichy government were romanticised as true French patriots. ...The Turner Diaries, a dystopian novel regarded as the bible of the far right, is a 1978 novel by WL Pierce (writing as Andrew Macdonald). It depicts a future society where white Americans have been subdued by non-white minorities. ... Anti-feminism and gender bias echo throughout the works of the Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson. Packaging age-old reactionary machismo with sophisticated, academic language, he is the perfect intellectual icon for young, discontented men involved in the radical right."

If you can’t embrace regional dialect, you can kiss my chuddies - article by Katy Guest in The Guardian. "In a rare piece of happy news to distract us momentarily from all the chaos, those lovely linguists at the Oxford English Dictionary have announced an abundance of new words all taken from regional dialects. The new entries include the Indian-English phrase 'kiss my chuddies'; the delicious word 'jibbons', which is what spring onions are called in Wales; and the Scottish words 'sitooterie', which is (obviously) a place to sit out, and 'bidie-in' ('a person who lives with his or her partner in a non-marital relationship'), which surely should have been in the dictionary ages ago, since the author Val McDermid, a fine connoisseur of the English language, uses it in her Twitter bio.... The OED promises to continue its search for regional terms, showcasing all the diverse glory of British English, as well as reminding us of everything we have in common – our wit, our ingenuity, our endless enthusiasm for a bum metaphor."

Why feedback is never worthwhile - article by Oliver Burkeman in his 'This column will change your life' column in The Guardian. "In their forthcoming book, Nine Lies About Work, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall make a startling claim, with implications far beyond the workplace: they argue that giving people feedback – in the sense of telling them what you think they’re doing right or wrong, and how to do it better – is never worthwhile. .... Buckingham and Goodall don’t just claim you should keep that knowledge to yourself: they claim that you don’t possess it, and that, in fact, you probably don’t know how a failing employee (or infuriating husband, or whatever) could most effectively change. It’s an old cliche of marital advice that you should use 'I-statements' rather than 'you-statements', telling the other person how their behaviour makes you feel, rather than attacking them for being selfish and incompetent. The standard rationale is that you-statements cause people to respond defensively. But another is that you’re a terrible judge of whether someone is selfish or incompetent. As Buckingham writes: 'The only realm in which humans are an unimpeachable source of truth is that of their own feelings and experiences.'”

Tom Gauld on the famous six-word story - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Recently discovered! Further instalments of the six-word story. // For sale: baby shoes. Never worn. // Don't worry, the baby is fine. // We just bought too many shoes. // It turns out that babies don't // need to wear shoes that often."

Why smart people are more likely to believe fake news - article by David Robson in The Guardian, based on his book The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things and How to Make Wiser Decisions. "We can ... see how misinformation can be engineered to bypass logical thinking and critical questioning. But do intelligence and education protect us against false claims? ... Consider the 'birther' theory that Barack Obama was not born in the US. This has been debunked time and time again, but it became highly ingrained in many people’s political ideology. And greater brainpower did not prevent them from believing the story; indeed, it actually increased their credulity. A study by Ashley Jardina at Duke University in North Carolina, for instance, ... found that beliefs in the birther theory were strongest among the participants with the greatest political knowledge.... Somehow, their greater knowledge simply allowed them to dismiss the new information and harden their attitudes.... This new understanding of misinformation should change the way we go about debunking falsehoods. In the past, the assumption was that you could present people with the facts and they would eventually sink in. Instead, some experts studying misinformation now favour a form of 'inoculation'.... Rather than tackling the claims [of climate change deniers] head on, Cook and Lewandowsky first showed the participants a report on the tobacco industry’s previous attempts to spread misinformation, which also included the use of fake experts to cast doubt on the scientific research that linked smoking to lung cancer. The strategy worked a treat."

'It is a religion': how the world went mad for Moomins - article by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "The Moomins and the Great Flood, the first in the novel series, begins with Moominmamma and Moomintroll looking for a place to live after they have been forced to leave their home behind the stove due to the advent of central heating (progress!). They are also searching for poor Moominpappa, feared drowned. The next, Comet in Moominland, tells how the family shelter from what threatens to be nothing less than the end of their world. In both books, we encounter boatloads of “small, pale creatures”, the Hattifatteners, doomed to wander from place to place, and 'crowds of fleeing creatures'. Originally published in 1945 and 46, but begun in 1939, those first two books were Jansson’s attempt to escape the terror of the second world war.... Mamma and Pappa were clearly based on Jansson’s own parents, ... determinedly liberal bohemians, who seemed happy to conform to traditional gender roles – although it was her mother who actually put food on the table. As with the Moominhouse, their doors were always open to a succession of colourful visitors. ... Finn Family Moomintroll, the third breakout book and still the most popular, published in 1948, is a much brighter affair. It is here that we encounter the inseparable Thingumy and Bob, carrying around a suitcase containing a secret ruby, to them 'the most beautiful thing in the world', believed to represent Jansson and her lover at the time, theatre director Vivica Bandler. (Homosexuality was illegal in Finland until 1971). ... The final novel Moominvalley in November (1970), the saddest of them all, [was] written just after the death of Jansson’s mother. 'It is a book about death, really' [says Mark Huckerby,, scriptwriter of the new animated adaptation], 'And about the loss of the Moomins. They aren’t even in it as the main characters. It’s a book in which everyone is waiting for them to return.' It is this strangely comforting combination of catastrophe and everyday cosiness that makes the Moomins so enchanting and enduring."

I was born black and working class. The identities need not be in opposition - article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. "Talking about class and identity can be as divisive as talking about race and racism. I am as much British, white and working class, my mother’s background, as I am black and Nigerian, my father’s heritage.... For me, staking a claim to the regional and class elements of my identity, and maintaining strong links to the place I grew up in, was a conscious decision. ... But what I once regarded as a personal choice, an act of self-identification, ... is increasingly viewed as a political stance or even an act of cultural appropriation. When black and mixed-race people claim their working-class identities, they now have to confront a strain of political thinking that asserts that only white people can be working class and that the 'white working class' is a group that has been assailed by minorities and betrayed by a 'metropolitan liberal elite' that cares only about minorities and race. This way of thinking strips non-white people of their class identities. It also denies basic historical and economic reality. For 70 years, people of all races in Britain have shared the same economic struggles. Despite racism, they have in many cases done so together, forging friendships, relationships and interracial families. As a result, working-class people are a diverse group."

Appeasing Hitler by Tim Bouverie: how Britain fell for a delusion - review by Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian. "There were plenty of people in the British ruling class who were appalled by Hitler and apprehended that he was a menace. Yet most of them trembled before the threat rather than take the necessary actions. One anxiety was that Britain had few allies. America had turned isolationist. To much of the British political class, Stalin’s Soviet Union was even more dangerous than Nazism. ... Another paralysing fear was of public opinion. ... A country deeply scarred by the 1914-18 conflict with the Germans had no appetite for another one. There was particular terror of the carnage that could be inflicted on civilian populations by aerial bombing. It became convenient for Britons to later forget that appeasement was highly popular with most of them right up to the point when Hitler’s invasion of Poland revealed the magnitude of the error. Chamberlain was widely proclaimed a masterful statesman when he came back from Munich in 1938 with his infamous piece of paper promising 'peace for our time'. In a flagrant abuse of his constitutional position, George VI invited the prime minister on to the balcony of Buckingham Palace to receive the cheers of the crowds thronging the Mall. They sang Rule Britannia and For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow."

Robinson Crusoe at 300: why it’s time to let go of this colonial fairytale - article by Charles Boyle in The Guardian. "A chauvinistic take on Robinson Crusoe, a very selective obsession with the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, and complete isolation from the opposite sex: at the posh end of the education system [in the 19th and early 20th centuries], an end that for generations was reserved exclusively for boys, this was a toxic mix. Long after the British empire had crumbled, it was a recipe designed to perpetuate the racism, sexism and unearned entitlement on which the empire had subsisted. Robinson Crusoe’s place in this mix was abetted by its status as (arguably) the first English novel and by the status accorded to literature within the culture. Simple in design, with strong contrasting colours overriding any psychological shading, Crusoe became a flag for empire and travelled in the luggage of merchants, missionaries and generals."