When pictures paint a thousand lies ...

Mark Twain once said that a lie can get half-way round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

There was a very good piece in the Speccie on Saturday by Isobel Hardman about pictures which paint a thousand lies, and which you can read at

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/isabel-hardman/2014/11/the-menace-of-memes-how-pictures-can-paint-a-thousand-lies/

Goodness knows that there are many ways in which our MPs are imperfect. But let's restrict our criticisms of them to those which are true.

A number of chain emails and pictures on twitter have been circulating which purport to show an empty House of Commons chamber when MPs are debating some important subject such as welfare reform, and a full one when they are debating some issue which affects MPs like their salary or expenses.

Isobel Hardman checked one of these out. The captions on the pictures which purported to show a full chamber debating MPs expenses and MPs salaries were downright lies - she proved that the dates given were wrong and these were actually taken from Prime Minister's Question Time and from the first session of parliament after a recess a decade ago, respectively. The welfare reform picture was correctly labelled but misleading - it showed the chamber when a debate had been going on for a considerable time, and the number of MPs who attended at least part of the debate had been much larger.

The people who circulate these things may well be innocent dupes acting in good faith, but the people who craft them know damn well that they are lying. Surely there are enough genuine reasons to criticise our MPs without making up this kind of black propaganda?

Comments

Jim said…
It true enough, there are indeed enough reasons to criticise MPs as it is, no one needs to make them up. If you get bored looking for reasons during a recess or somthing then you can find zillions of reasons by looking into the real government, its quite revealing when you do that.

also its easy to mis judge a person, I personally have been called a tory, a labour voter, and a lib dem voter, and a UKIP voter all in the same thread on face book. It was quite clever really, only by pointing out the downfalls in each parties policy, people often think you are the other.

For the record, then I hope the Conservative party do win this time, and I hope they win with a Majority. though i expect myself and the host here both have very different reasons for wanting that
5:46 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
I know what you mean about people assuming that if you criticise one party you must be a supporter of the other. Very easy trap to fall into but it doesn't always apply.

Both Nick Robinson and Jeremy Paxman are actually "One Nation" tories but take pride in scrutinising every party's policies and I've read comments from every political persuasion you can think of accusing the two of them of being biased in the opposite direction to the person making the comment.

I recently saw a TV show in which someone asked what the word "assume" does, and the answer was "makes an ass of U and me."
8:55 am
Jim said…
Speaking of that here is an actual comment thread. I was being somewhat critical of the Road announcement:

ME- Yes, its all thanks to the "long term economic plan" anyone else notice that is was nothing to do with EU regulation 1315/2013?

Name i wont give - Yeah, I did, I guess you are a Labour voter as well, well said Jim

Me- well, actually no, there are currently about 90 billion good reasons why i wont vote for a Labour government.

NIWG- well they are due to Cameron, so you must be either Lib dem or a green?

me - neither

NIWG- wait, looking back over your comments you look like a typical UKIP supporter, i had you down as better.

*at which point they "unliked" my first comment, and i never did reply. I was too busy trying to modify my Honda Accord to get to Mars
6:32 pm
Jim said…
Now you see it in a whole new light, point one i made was really it does not matter who is in government the roads must be improved, Its an order form the EU, to which they anwered i was right to be a Labour voter? Erm ok, work that out, but i figured he does not know that and is not going to look it up, so i went for 90 billion good reasons (meaning the deficit)
that worked out well didn't it, the deficit is DCs fault (I mean i will call DC on a lot of things, but causing the deficit is not one of them) then he goes on to decide which party i support, rather than understand a single point I made, then decides I am a UKIP supporter so not worth talking to.

No doubt he be telling people to avoid me like the plague as i am a closet racist. That is the working of the minds of some people and that is why "stop the world, I'm getting off" springs to mind with me so much

8:12 pm
Jim said…
Though that does harbour an important point. All most everything a government announce is not really that, its just really a statement as to how they will carry out an EU regulation, which in turn comes from a global body, on which we have 1/28th of a seat......Ho Hum.....
9:10 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
Some people have a tribal attitude to the party they support - they take for granted that people on their own side are more honest, more caring, or more intelligent and that people in whichever parties they least like are all idiots or bad people.

Among the public as a whole that kind of tribalism is dying, but among some party activists and some people who post comments on the internet it is still regrettably strong.

And it is often so much easier to say "Oh, you look like a typical UKIP/Tory/Leftie/LibLabCon supporter so I will ignore you as an extremist nutter" (delete according to prejudice) than to engage with the argument which has actually been made.
8:40 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

Image
I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more