Why did Americans start ingesting horse paste?

 

In recent weeks, social media has been doing what it does best – laughing at idiots. The idiots du jour are right-wing anti-vax folk, and mocking them has become a cause celebre for everyone else. But what led to a subsection of the American right to turn to horse paste as a Covid medicine?

The story really is one for our age, a mixture of institutional distrust and alternative media groupthink. Its nexus is where the evolutionary need to keep safe intersects with the growing conspiracy industry. 

Of course, the American right wing has been on an increasingly intense diet of conspiracy theories, starting long before Donald Trump came along and started spoon feeding this hungry crowd. In many ways they were primed for a pandemic and all its opportunities to spread nonsense. We’ve had everything from masks inhibiting oxygen intake, to Bill Gates microchips, to 5g causing Covid.

But the horse paste one caught my eye, not only because it’s so ridiculous, but because of the way people reacted – in a completely understandable and really unhelpful way.

Let’s break down the story a little. The reason people are taking horse medicine is because of the what’s in it – ivermectin. Ivermectin has been touted by some as a Covid-19 wonder drug. The most high profile of these devotees is probably Bret Weinstein, who with his wife rose hosts the DarkHorse podcast. Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist, is one a member of the so-called intellectual dark web, a group of smart people who, in their words, think outside the mainstream box, and are prepared to ask questions that the mainstream deems unconscionable. 

Along with people like physician Dr. Pierre Kory MD, self-designated inventor of mNRA vaccines Robert W. Malone MD, and millionaire entrepreneur Steve Kirsch, they have come out with some quite remarkable claims. These include the claim that ivermectin can drive Covid to extinction, is incredibly effective at stopping you get Covid, and works really well as a treatment if you’ve already got it. They back up their claims with anecdotal evidence, and also with reference to complex trials which most of us don’t understand. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” is their message, and ivermectin is the gift that keeps giving.

These claims are only half of their narrative. The other half is just as important: the big pharma conspiracy to hide the truth about ivermectin, because ivermectin is an old drug which doesn’t generate profits. Big pharma wants you to take their expensive drugs, of course, and the regulators and the mainstream media and big tech are all in on it too.

Not only to they praise ivermectin, but they simultaneously cast doubt on the vaccines. They’ve made misleading claims about how vaccine spike proteins effect ovaries, and that having a more highly vaccinated population increases the chance of creating new Covid variants. So while undermining trust on a brand new vaccine, they also present a perfectly safe alternative. That’s got to be appealing for anyone who is dubious about injecting something new and scary into their arms.

To be clear about ivermectin. It is an anti-parasitic drug developed by Merck in 1975 and has been taken by billions of people. It’s not dangerous for humans, unlike Trump’s medical suggestion – bleach. But the WHO, the CDC and the FDA don’t just go around endorsing medicines for illnesses just because we know they are safe, otherwise we’d all be frantically downing aspirin to ward off Covid. Whether ivermectin has any benefits against Covid is currently being investigated – drugs do get repurposed after all. Some countries have indeed been using it for Covid treatment (sometimes just to appease sick patients who are convinced it will help). But the trials and meta-analysis referred to by Weinstein and his associates are not conclusive in the way they claim; some have even been retracted because of concerns about fraud. 

On the other hand, there is a completely transparent, global, real-world study on the effectiveness and safety of the vaccines, because they are literally being taken by people almost everywhere, and the death rates plummet as a result. The data comes straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

However, these dubious claims about ivermectin and the vaccines have been heard by millions of listeners and YouTube viewers, most of whom follow these intellectual dark web types precisely because of their insatiable anti-mainstream appetite. In other words, they are ready to believe whatever the opposite of the ‘establishment’ happens to be. If mainstream medicine did come around to endorsing ivermectin, these audiences would probably move on to something else.

In the meantime, some of those who are doubtful about the vaccines have convinced themselves that ivermectin is a great alternative. And now the seeds of this campaign are beginning to bear fruit. A British man called Leslie Lawrenson recently died having chosen not to get vaccinated. He had shared DarkHorse info on his Facebook. Caleb Wallace, from “San Angelo Freedom Fighters” in the USA, was self-medicating with ivermectin, and died in August after getting Covid. Dr. Pierre Korey, who had called ivermectin “miraculous” before a Senate Committee, recently got Covid, despite using ivermectin to prevent himself getting Covid. And then there’s all those buying the horse paste. 

With regulators not recommending ivermectin for Covid prevention or treatment, those convinced of its benefits aren’t often able to get it through the regular means. Instead, they’ve discovered that horse dewormer also contains ivermectin, and decided to take that. While ivermectin is a well-established drug, the version designed for animals could poison you, and that’s what’s been happening quite a lot.

But the real problem here is how the alt-medicine racket gets entangled with the anti-vax message, and heightens the cultish paranoia that certain people have with the whole pandemic saga. The result is that these people aren’t getting the approved, free vaccines which are by all accounts really effective. That extends the pandemic for the rest of us.

But I would say that, wouldn’t I? Because I’m one of the MSM-brainwashed sheeple.

In an April article on OutbreakNewsToday detailing an FDA warning about using animal ivermectin, a commenter called Susan, using fairly typical language, implored others to “STOP BELIEVING THE LIES THAT THE LIBS AND MEDIA ARE SPILLING. BE PROACTIVE. I WISH I HAD KNOWN ABOUT IVERMECTIN FOR MY SON, MAYBE HE WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SO SICK.”

As natural as it is to mock people who are ingesting horse paste and getting diarrhoea when there is a perfectly good, safe vaccine available for them, unfortunately the mocking and shaming doesn’t change their minds. They just look for someone online with an MD after their name who agrees with what they already think, and double down. 

A lot of the jokes about ivermectin understandably refer to the fact that people are eating some disgusting paste designed for deworming horses, which sounds crazy, while most of the thinking behind the craziness is a belief that this drug, ivermectin, should be rolled out as a Covid treatment. That is far less crazy, especially if you don’t know anything about medicine and someone with Dr. in front of their name or MD after their name has been telling you it’s a wonder drug. Far less crazy, but still wrong.

Fundamentally, the fact that many of the horse paste eaters got their idea from a podcast called DarkHorse is too good not to make jokes about. We are just human after all, and the human flaws that lead some down rabbit holes are the same flaws that make it irresistible for others to mock them, even sometimes the dead ones.

Some of the ivermectin advocates have begun to distance themselves from the controversy as their claims look stupider and the real-world damage becomes more apparent. But it seems that for ivermectin, the horse has already bolted. Black markets selling the stuff are popping up all over, and those touting the drug have an attentive audience. They don’t want to change horses in midstream. The conspiracy industry is galloping on, and we’re all cracking the whip.

Falling Men: the cruel circularity of America’s War on Terror

*The first article I wrote in a long time went to Dorset Eye, "independent citizen media" with a decidedly lefty stance on things. They didn't credit me as the writer, which is maybe OK because it's a bit of a dodgy article with a fairly flakey central metaphor.* 

One of the most shocking images to come out of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Centre was that of the Falling Man. Shot by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew, the image showed a nameless male plummeting through the air, set against the metallic backdrop of one of the towers. Not unlike the inhabitant of the Tomb of the Unknown Solder, the Falling Man was in a way representative of all the victims of that day. It invited us to ask ourselves what we would do in that situation, when the flames get so close and the only exit is certain death. Just like the attack itself, it was almost unthinkable. 

That 9/11 changed the world is a truism that only becomes more apparent as time goes on. In response America’s neoconservatives sought to right the wrongs of the Gulf War and get rid of Saddam Hussein; liberal interventionists sought to extend democracy to those living under the yoke of despots. A muscular, righteous America was going to put things right – so the story went.

But while attempting to extend its values to the world, the US struggled to hold true to those values. They fudged the evidence on Saddam’s WMDs, collaborated with Afghan warlords when it suited them, tortured enemies or presumed enemies, extended surveillance of citizens, and got around the tricky problem of judicial due process by setting up a prison at Guantanamo Bay. Tales of war crimes, human rights abuses, and civil rights violations abound.

The Iraq War ended with no plan for the aftermath, giving rise to an even more megalomaniacal terrorist organisation, Isis. George W. Bush had said that “I believe that democracy will prevail, so long as the United States stays with these young democracies to help them.” But far from promoting democracy abroad, America was losing faith in it at home. Enter: Donald Trump.

This summer, as the last American troops began heading home from its longest war, it didn’t take long for the Taliban to sweep across Afghanistan. Unsupported Afghan troops had enough experience to know that it was not worth fighting. As the Taliban surrounded Kabul, the president fled, a transition was agreed, and everyday citizens, including many who had some kind of connection with the West’s mission there, tried to escape. 

This long chapter of the War on Terror ended with another spectacle of men falling from great heights – not from collapsing, smoke-filled buildings, but from aeroplanes. Instead of flames, the danger was Taliban militants rearmed with abandoned US hardware. Instead of being missiles, these planes were the last hope of desperate people.

Importantly from an American perspective, these were Afghan bodies falling into Afghan soil. Whether it’s just the political reality, or whether Joe Biden is more similar to Trump than he’d like to admit, America First is the guiding principle of the White House. It is a lesson which America’s NATO allies – and Taiwan – will have learned, and was summed up by Biden bemoaning the Afghan Army’s supposed refusal to fight: “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.” Would the same logic not have applied for the British and French in World War 2?

America’s War on Terror was never going to prevent terrorism per se, but its leaders could hope that its spectacles would occur elsewhere. In a way that mission is complete – but for how long? Islamists around the world are now cheering a job well done, vindicated that God is smiling upon them. Hard won democratic freedoms have been lost, and we could be at the beginning of another wave of attacks. It’s easy to conclude that, for all the lost lives, we’ve come full circle.

But in fact we are not back where we started, because the wider picture has changed. America on the world stage has been damaged perhaps beyond repair in the years since 9/11, starting with the illegal and botched Iraq War. Barack Obama’s statesmanship was undermined by his hollow words on Syrian chemical weapons and the Russian annexation of Crimea, and Trump’s lack of statesmanship alienated allies and emboldened enemies. It was, after all, Trump who gave Kim Jong-un international legitimacy, who got Iran enriching uranium again, who withdrew troops from Syria, enabling Isis terrorists to escape from prison en masse. And, yes, it was he who warmly agreed a deal with the Taliban to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan. 

Meanwhile, the great game of global influence ramps up. Russian whataboutism has portrayed America as hypocrites as the Kremlin engages in its campaigns of division, assassination, and sometimes outright invasion. China has presented itself as the adult in the room, refusing to lecture other countries on their domestic situation, expecting the same in return, and buying loyalty through investment. China will extend that attitude towards Afghanistan’s new rulers, and cement their authority in the region. 

If Karl Marx was correct that historical events occur twice – first as tragedy, then as farce – then the American withdrawal of Afghanistan is surely the farce that we’ve been waiting for. But it’s not only a retreat from Afghanistan; America is withdrawing from the world stage. The falling men – one at home and one abroad – represent America’s 21st century malaise, its domestic convulsions as it comes to terms with its relative decline.

The Social Acceptability List 2016

Another year whipped by, and it turned out to be a year like no other. Rulebooks are being burned and ripped up and rewritten, and what’s deemed acceptable has become a game of trial and error. The Overton Window has been stretched, but perhaps only for those with the most vocal following. So what’s in and what’s out? The Fallen in Public look at our politicians, newspapers and netizens - What’s in? What’s out? What’s OK? What’s not? Read on to find out...

IT'S IN! Scaring the shit out of people

AT THEIR BEST, CLOWNS ARE UNSETTLING, BUT IN 2016 THEY WENT TERRIFYING. The killer clown craze, starting in the USA, later embraced in the UK, Canada and Australia was born by social media, and boosted by the constantly mortified traditional media, putting fear or joy into readers' hearts depending on their blood pressure.

A harmless prank or a menace? Why not both?

Clowns with knives were seen, lending weight to the theory that these are a new breed of terrorist; panic that paedophiles and sexual molesters might disguise themselves as clowns spread in the news, which would be a strange occurrence because these sorts tend to have more success when they disguise themselves as people.

How coincidental is it that this craze occurred in 2016? ‘You have no right not to be scared’ weirdly parallels the ‘you have no right to not be offended’ jibe coming from the anti-liberals on Twitter, or those who wear T-shirts saying ‘Does my American flag offend you? Call 1-800-LEAVE-THE-USA’. It’s been a year of victory for those that scaring the shit out of people, being offensive, being unkind and inconsiderate, all for kicks is appropriate because it’s not illegal. Don’t like it? Deal with it.

Even scarier were the clowns on the TV – Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage, and Donald Trump – proving once and for all that clowns aren’t funny but just give you nightmares.

The Social Acceptability List 2016

Another year whipped by, and it turned out to be a year like no other. Rulebooks are being burned and ripped up and rewritten, and what’s deemed acceptable has become a game of trial and error. The Overton Window has been stretched, but perhaps only for those with the most vocal following. So what’s in and what’s out? The Fallen in Public look at our politicians, newspapers and netizens - What’s in? What’s out? What’s OK? What’s not? Read on to find out...

IT'S IN! Strongmen

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue, shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Donald Trump

After thirty years of whinging, sensitive liberals ruling the world, it’s time for the Strongmen. Packaged and sold as the answer to all problems, strongmen are being chosen by their populations to halt the liberal march towards doom, with its nightmarish vision of people getting along. The strongmen of choice are headed by president-elect Donald Trump and his Russian friend, the indestructible Vladimir Putin, but others are making their mark: Recep Tayyip Erdogan was in 2013 a mere Prime Minister, when he began the plans for replacing Gezi Park with a shopping centre. Protests followed, and took on a hue of anger directed not only at redevelopment misery, but other concerns about the direction of this proudly democratic Islamic country, an issue that many had seen coming given Erdogan’s history and right-wing Islamic ideology. But Erdogan’s crackdown and his authoritarian figure must have delighted some, because he was elected president the next year. After blaming a coup on Fethullah Gülen, who lives safely in the USA, Erdogan’s relationship with Obama cooled, and with Putin, warmed, despite shooting down the latter's plane earlier in the year.

On the other side of the planet the Philippines elected Rodrigo Duterte, who unleashed ‘death squads’ to murder suspected drug dealers and users. Unrepentant, Duterte defended himself against ‘corrupt’ journalists and their questions, called Obama a ‘son of a whore’, and made friendly waves across the sea towards China. Strike 2 for America’s hopeful first black president.

China’s president Xi, while far gentler in tone than his brethren, is championed at home as a strongman - the great counterweight to America’s might - and also has in his corner the added kudos of not even pretending to be democratic.

While the UK hasn’t quite elected one, much of the political muscle has been provided by our very own autocrat-in-waiting, Nigel Farage, who’s fast learned that demagoguery can be sought and found and enacted without the need of the ballot box. Wearing the mask of a democrat, he ran his party like Mao and uses headline grabbing controversies to get his name out, rather than reason or debate. After bemoaning Obama’s involvement in the UK/EU referendum as meddling in UK affairs, he went and did the same thing in the USA. All the while getting the benefit of the doubt from our media.

Having realised that neither bigotry nor lies can dent his appeal, Farage went hypocrisy crazy by endorsing Trump’s mad suggestion that he would be a great ambassador. If only all authoritarian leaders could pick their ambassadors, hey Nige. Over Christmas he worked Berlin’s terrorist attack into his favourite political cause (destroying the EU) and called Brendan Cox an extremist for supporting the anti-extremist organisation, Hope Not Hate. On Christmas Day, this ‘defender of Christian values’ told his Twitter followers to ‘ignore’ the ‘negative’ Archbishop of Canterbury, as if Farage’s followers weren’t already ignoring those who call for peace, understanding and unity.

With more trouble coming, al la Brexit, Farage will be poised to make it the fault of liberals and elected politicians, rather than himself. He might just do it. For these strongmen aren’t just winging it – they’ve managed to get the ears of the electorates, seizing the vacuum of trust in the political establishment. Their self-consciously anti-pc language is cheered on as it gets on liberals’ nerves. Even lies and hypocrisy are applauded as long as liberals are being hounded – the strongmen act as leaders of movements in which the liar lies on behalf of the mob, fighting for what they think is a bigger cause. Populations in fear grant their leaders this licence.

Much talk of late on democracy, people power and how important it is. It’s one of the few things which simply cannot be questioned. But the rise of the strongmen shows that people, albeit unconsciously, are desperate to be led, and to have blind faith that the leader’s cruel worlds will only manifest in actions which affect others. Democratic authoritarianism is in!

The Social Acceptability List 2016

Another year whipped by, and it turned out to be a year like no other. Rulebooks are being burned and ripped up and rewritten, and what’s deemed acceptable has become a game of trial and error. The Overton Window has been stretched, but perhaps only for those with the most vocal following. So what’s in and what’s out? The Fallen in Public look at our politicians, newspapers and netizens - What’s in? What’s out? What’s OK? What’s not? Read on to find out...

IT’S OUT!

Experts: “I think people in this country have had enough of experts.” Michael Gove, 2016.

Give me your academics, your economists, your huddled central bankers yearning to speak free, the wretched refuse of your teeming think tanks. And bind and gag them and throw them out to sea. If 2016 was anything, it was the year that people stopped listening to people who know more about things than they do, and this distrust – this victory of blind gut instinct – has been celebrated. This is a victory of the little people, said Nigel Farage, self-appointed king of the little people.

It’s been a long time coming. Experts have been ushered onto news panels next to politicians and pundits for some time now, and as the latter two’s trust has waned over the years, it’s no surprise that the third has been condemned. Digital media has done its part by making everyone a journalist (read expert) and most analyses condensable into 142 characters. An entire thesis can be cast in to the bin with one comment below the line: “What is this shit?”

After two years of surprise results in the UK and the US, pollsters were the first to look daft. If they can get it wrong, pundits wondered, maybe all experts are wrong? And maybe, just maybe, the opposing position to that of experts is correct by definition. Yep, find out what experts think, and choose the other option – that’s where we’re at. “Experts built the Titanic,” noted an insightful caller on Radio 2.

Economists have been making bad predictions for all of eternity; it’s not their fault if politicians have presented them as cast iron guarantees, rather than a collection of estimates within set parameters. But economic orthodoxy, faith in the neoliberal model, has no doubt blinded economists to failures: the IMF, the ECB and central banks in the West have been peddling neoliberal economic policy (austerity, privatisation, deregulation, etc.) regardless of evidence contrary to its expectations, and evidence of poor results. The reason? Too many rich people are doing too well.

You’d expect the cynics of economic experts to be crying out against neoliberalism, right? Well, curiously enough Michael Gove hasn’t gone this far, perhaps because the economic consensus, the one he’s been telling people to ignore, is largely based on policies made possible and popular by one Margaret Thatcher, and are rather close to his heart.

The depth of the anti-economist jibe is this: they didn’t see the financial crash coming; they haven’t fixed the euro. And look at Greece – eeww. Who could argue with that? A child can understand it.

The distrust extends to the high reaches of academia, charged with being left-wing brainwashers by a McCarthyist press, the judiciary, labelled ‘enemies of the people’ by the Daily Mail for making judgements on constitutional law, and international organisations like NATO, the UN, the International Criminal Court. These post WW2 organisations are a pain in the ass for Russia, China and Israel, and now America has a president who’ll finally sympathise.

Against the experts are pitted the people, the real people. "There's only one expert that matters, and that's you, the voter," Gisela Stuart of Vote Leave puked into a microphone earlier this year, in a wonderful celebration of 2016, the year when truth and knowledge went relative.

The Social Acceptability List 2016

Another year whipped by, and it turned out to be a year like no other. Rulebooks are being burned and ripped up and rewritten, and what’s deemed acceptable has become a game of trial and error. The Overton Window has been stretched, but perhaps only for those with the most vocal following. So what’s in and what’s out? The Fallen in Public look at our politicians, newspapers and netizens - What’s in? What’s out? What’s OK? What’s not? Read on to find out...

IT'S IN: Walls!

"I WILL BUILD A GREAT WALL" – Donald Trump.

Walls are back! Some thought that walls had had their day, but they were wrong.

The Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall and the Wailing Wall are great historical walls of fear, division and protection, and so are our contemporary walls. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 signifying the end of capitalist/communist, east/west, democratic/authoritarian divisions, the presumed new order was to be one of unfettered (as much as humanly possible) trade and travel, typified in institutions like the EU. Liberal democracy was the answer, it was said – problem solved. But with capital flight, gentrification, outsourcing and (deep breath) immigration, along with other traits of neoliberal capitalism – wage stagnation, job insecurity, etc. – western populations have rediscovered their love of being boxed in.

It’s no great surprise that immigration tends to be the big villain. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign wallowed in the dirty language of xenophobia, promising to build a wall to keep out Mexicans. Britain doesn’t need a wall to keep out Europeans, because we already have a moat, but the sentiments were the same: fear of outsiders coming to wreak havoc and steal jobs. The simplest answers are given for the most complex of problems, and what could be simpler than a wall? If Ukip ran on a ticket of widening the moat, they’d surely sail to victory.

The EU has an external border, but since 2015 temporary internal borders have been reintroduced all around France and in certain areas around Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Going rogue, Hungary has been whipping up walls, one alongside its non-EU neighbour Serbia; one alongside its ‘open border’ neighbour Romania. The EU external border is gradually becoming more rigorously fortified.

Not one to be left out, Britain has joined in the effort to combat the Migrant Crisis because she is beginning to feel the effects, and so in an effort to stop refugees and better life-seekers from getting into trucks and getting into the UK, Britain has built a wall in Calais, one kilometre long. It’s a classic example of treating the symptoms rather than the causes. Perhaps they are practicing for the post-Brexit world, which could include a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, and maybe, if all hell really breaks loose and Scotland goes independent, one there too! I’m guessing no one will want to talk about causes there too.

Walls are nothing if not symbolic, and sometimes you can have the symbolic aspect without the physical thing. So non-tangible walls are on the up too: London is seen as an out-of-touch enclave of Liberal Metropolitan Elitists; Washington is a swamp which Trump has promised to drain; European provincials are unsure whether they should hate Berlin or Brussels more; Russians and Ukrainians despise one another; the English think the Scots are taking their money, the Scots think the English are taking their freedom; the British young blame the British old for taking them out of the EU; liberals blame bigots for taking them out of the EU; bigots blame politicians, globalists and soppy wet liberals for creating an EU that had to be left, and my gran blames everyone for everything. Extremely high, albeit imaginary, walls separate all sides.

And the digital world makes it super easy to discover just how hated you are. Social media is rife with communities which communicate in echo chambers, learning how to use keywords to separate their friends and their foes – libtards, Brexiteers, Remoaners, Leavers, Remainers, MSM, Daily Hate, Guardianistas, ‘out of touch’, progressives, ‘regressives’, control, ‘religion of peace’, ‘waycist’. The internet, striving to replicate and re-present the anxieties of the real world and doing a damn fine job.

The Social Acceptabilty List 2016

Last Christmas, we gave you a list. The Social Acceptability List 2015 sought to reflect on a year of social discourse; how certain concepts, words and things moved towards or away from the so-called Overton Window. The list was this:

It was in!

islamophobia, war, voting out the box, ties with china, shaming

It was out!

privilege, global warming denial.

A year on, we’re able to see how things have changed, or haven't. Islamophobia’s still riding high with burkini bans in France and “Donald J Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”. War, too, is ever popular, with the one in Syria reaching what appears to be a disastrous climax.

The social activism of ‘shaming’ and ‘checking one’s (or another’s) privilege’ has continued, and the tactics and concepts of the left have spread to the right: the so-called white male’s fightback is simply identity politics without the understanding of historical prejudices. Hence where privilege last year was out, it’s now in. The Identitarian Movement of Europe, and the Alt-right movement in the US, seek power in their white, male identities in the same way that Beyonce found it in her black, female one.  

Voting out the box (Syriza, Podemos, Ukip, Corbyn...) was big in 2015 but 2016 has been defined by it, specifically by Brexit and Trump – two votes which threaten to throw entire societies into the wilderness. 2016 has been marked by a vocal disgust at those who have voted in this way, leading to debates about how and where people get their information. Those who question Facebook as a reliable news source and/or the Trump/Farage-led peddlers of deliberate mistruth and misrepresentation are told they are scornful of voters who warmed to it, and are, ultimately, undemocratic.

Finally, discussion of global warming has been drowned out by talk of other things, but conspiracies in general are up and global warming denial has been bolstered by Trump, who claimed that manmade global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to thwart the American economy. On the back of these loose words, and with a rise in protectionist economic policy sentiments, ties with China could be in question. Trump has taken a pop at China’s South China Sea militarisation, taken issue with China’s low valued currency, and taken a call from Tsai Yingwen, Taiwan’s independence-leaning president, hitting China precisely where it hurts.

After 2015’s glory year in Anglo-Chinese relations, typified in Xi Jinping’s romantic trip to David Cameron’s pub, and George Osborne’s glowing expectations of trade with the Chinese, 2016 has been full of stumbles. The Brexit vote has caused worry and bemusement in China, who value stability over pretty much everything. The new UK PM Theresa May ordered a review into the Chinese-backed Hinkley Point power station because of security concerns. But things settled down later: May went ahead with Hinkley (as if she had a choice), and China’s state-backed SinoFortone bought the pub chain that includes Cameron’s pub so Xi could toast this little victory.

Keep posted for the Social Acceptability List 2017!