Tu Quoque – The Lad Treated On The Floor Of The Hospital

Apparently, that the National Health Service is not very good at providing health service is proof that the country is descending into fascism:

What we’re seeing here is deeply disturbing. In response to a story it doesn’t like, the Conservative Party – or more likely, a separate organisation with plausible deniability of its connections to the Conservative Party – is trying to bury it not with spin, but with outright lies and defamation. Those lies are coming from a range of sock puppet accounts on multiple social networks and their message is then amplified by tame journalists.

This is no different from the fake-news chants of Donald Trump: the goal is to delegitimise the media, to push the narrative that everything you read critical of The Party is a lie. And it’s a key tactic of fascist politics, which is why it’s so frightening.

Fascism does not begin with jackboots. It begins with creating a “them” and an “us” and then delegitimising the institutions that limit state power such as the judiciary and the press.

Tu quoque is, often enough, a logical fallacy. But if this is true that fake news is the start of that descent into fascism then what is this?

During August 2016, a video was released of Corbyn sitting on the floor of a VTEC train while campaigning during a leadership challenge by Owen Smith. Corbyn said the train was “ram-packed” and used this to support his policy to reverse the 1990s privatisation of the railways of Great Britain, which created private operators such as VTEC.

Controversy developed when Virgin released CCTV images a week later appearing to show Corbyn walking past available seats, leading to accusations that the incident had been staged for political gain, which Corbyn denied, saying “Yes, I did walk through the train. Yes, I did look for two empty seats together so I could sit down with my wife, to talk to her. That wasn’t possible so I went to the end of the train.” Reactions were mixed, with commentators finding both support and damage for all sides involved.

Hmm.