I don't know where 'permissibility' came from. Not from me. No permits here. I don't always do my very best because that's the way I do things, sometimes I'm lazy or feeling self-indulgent. Laziness and self-indulgence might be part of eudaimonia, the good life. Maybe extremes and ideals don't fit there that well, if I don't share in this notion of a Fundamental Ethical Attitude.

It's a pity society doesn't believe in hell any more. As it is, these people believe, among other things, that as they will take themselves out with their final, despicable act, they will never have to suffer the consequences. So I can't see any way to prevent these acts from regularly occuring from now on. I think it is an extreme manifestation of the attitude that nothing matters, and that everything is simply a spectacle - a complete disassociation from reality. — Wayfarer

And yet it does resemble the wave of anarchist terrorism in the late 19th century. There were real conspiracies who committed atrocities and killings; and there were also loners like McKinley's assassin, who were 'inspired' by other events to create an event of their own. It doesn't take many men to take this path, for fear and panic, understandably, to grip populations. Two Conrad novels powerfully evoke the times, albeit from a conservative perspective, 'Under western eyes' and 'The secret agent'.

I don't see the link with the idea of hell. Did hell really put people off committing foul murders? Some Islamists believe in heaven, and it is the corollary of hell that justifies their act: that they themselves will go to heaven, having left the earth behind as a better place. Belief in divine imaginary places beyond our human span seems to help fuel such things, rather than deter them.

Cabrera also has his own statement online: http://philosopherjuliocabrera.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/negative-ethics.html

Regularly I am faced with the question: How shall I act? This way, or that way?

Well, I decide. Some of the considerations in my deliberations I label 'ethical', and I debate other people's decisions and label some of them in the same way. It doesn't seem to me that removing the label 'ethical' from such decisions and debates will change the nature of the debate. There is something which we find it useful to call 'ethical'.

Many of these decisions are about acts that relate to other people. I don't personally elevate the interests of other people above my own, so I don't subscribe to Cabrera's supposed fundamental ethical attitude (and nor would, say, an Aristotelian virtue ethicist, for whom self-love is the cornerstone of ethics). I weigh likely outcomes.

It seems to me I shall go on with such weighing, however melancholy I feel about life, and whatever my opinions about murder and procreation. So his negative ethics seem to be, oddly, set as it were to one side of my ethics. I prefer to contribute to the mitigation of suffering, my own and other people's, as long as it doesn't put me out too much. I'm not clear why someone who feels suffering is the human lot would go on to argue that our ethics is not about mitigating suffering. This may not be 'the good life', but what about 'the less unpleasant life'?

Could you speak more about this? I'm still having trouble connecting awareness to identity, even with the example of dementia. Perhaps this is because I think of awareness as withing the context of Searle's discussions on consciousness -- where the term refers to our ability to focus or unfocus our mind upon various things within our environment or mind. I gather that awareness and memory are actually linked in this way of referring to awareness, though. — Moliere

Actually this relates to something I've been mooching about and pondering: 'the familiar'. This is my keyboard that I spilt grapefruit juice on, my view out of the window, my partner downstairs. The people and trappings of my world are familiar to me, some mingling of perception and memory. When I go out walking I'm struck by how moving here to the Pennines has made the strange become familiar, and part of me: I am the landscape I move through, when I repeat and repeat and repeat. Ideas about myself are then analogous to this, an inner furniture. Ah yes: that's my sexual peccadillo, those were my most foolish moments, this is my ethical stance on this, that was what I used to think.

I presume dementia makes the formerly familiar into the unfamiliar, both in the world around us and within. And yet until it gets very bad the demented often still know their way around, with know-how, they can find the loo and the kettle for tea-making, but they can't remember how they come to know, i.e. in Ryle's terms knowing-that-for-a-reason seems to have gone. People are kind and claim they're related to you, who knows why they are doing this?

Labour has never been stronger. — charleton

I am a leftie Green. I believe Mr Corbyn agrees with more of my party's platform than he does of Labour's.

In my part of the world, decimated by industrial decline and neo-liberalism permeating the welfare system by turning former rights into hard-to-win benefits, Labour looks the weakest it has been for a long time. Indeed it resembles a coalition on the verge of imploding or dividing into two, both groups of which are tiresomely self-aggrandising. It certainly lacks strength either in power - it has none - or in ideas - it's not at all clear what these are.

The Conservatives, on the other hand, have recovered brilliantly from the referendum vote and look destined for power for a decade.

This has a melancholy look. Maybe I'm just in a bad mood at it all. I think I may focus more energies on the epistemology of epistemology for the time being.

what you mean by identity is awareness of it? — Mongrel

That certainly seems to apply in dementia: one's self-identity floats away, sometimes with traumatic interruptions en route. 'You are not my child,' says the mother to the daughter, 'she never comes to visit.' If one no longer has anchoring longer-term memories to which to relate one's perceptions, one loses one's self of oneself. And yet, as Moliere says (interesting thread Moliere), up to then the person might well have got along without thinking much about self-awareness.

The second train of thought I have is autobiographical. I moved to a new town where I knew absolutely no-one ten years ago. In an odd way I have constructed a new identity - while eventually emerging from the darkness I was in 10 years ago, to reconnect with friends In knew in my old identity too. Yet of course the experiencing animal feels like 'the same' one, and there are various character traits or dispositions which seem shared between the old and new fellow.

In past times, before formalised State-monitored identity developed early in the 20th century, I think this happened more often, that you could move to a new place, take on a new name and begin again, with only you knowing what was 'the same' about the two personas.

One other thought: the rational part of us has a strong urge to ascribe some logic to personal identity. But to my mind an individual human being is rarely that consistent: sometimes they will do something that directly contradicts something else they do or have done. The human creature does what it can in each particular set of circumstances to get by, and rationalisations come later.

Socrates pushes Theaetetus to accept that knowledge must be something more than just true belief - it must be justified true belief. And so this concept reigned for a while until other epistemologies started to crop up, culminating in the Gettier cases. — darthbarracuda

This is the opposite of what Plato says. He stands at the beginning of an entirely different tradition, that 'belief' and 'knowledge' are of different kinds and can't be intermingled.

'Justified true belief' is largely a 20th century development.

One alternative is that knowledge is not usefully analyzable, as Timothy Williamson argues..

Furthermore, as Heidegger noted, anxiety is a fundamental aspect of being a human. This anxiety is from not-knowing — darthbarracuda

Surely this is the opposite of what Heidegger says too? i.e. on the contrary that anxiety comes from knowing?

Anxiety brings Dasein face-to-face with its Being-free-for the authenticity of its Being... — Being and Time 188

I bet my bottom dollar I'll lose the blues there — Ciceronianus the White

My brother had that song on a 78, back in the 1950's, that also included songs from High Society. One of my favourite politically dodgy things to do is to perform a passable imitation of the Satchmo contribution to the climax to the song 'High Society'...Bap-bip-pee-oh-mo-yeh-----uuuuuuu-teeeee...

I'm as tired as you are of gender fluidity bullshit and special snowflake syndromes. Both of them are luxury goods that wealthy, reasonably peaceful societies can afford and enjoy. People living close to the edge of survival can't screw around with this sort of stuff. — Bitter Crank

There are many other countries with many other cultures that grapple with the same issues, and indeed, have been more accepting than the puritanical West. I'm not convinced that this is a first world problem as you imply. The position of hijra in the Indian sub-continent, for instance, or kathoey in Thaiiland, or travestis in South America, these are all examples of sub-groups wanting to express themselves as of different gender, and the wider society coming to terms with those views.

I'm not clear why we would want, as the op seems to argue, to wish away designations that some people very much want to apply to themselves. What's wrong with being accepting and mutually tolerant and getting back to discussing problems that are harder to solve than this one?

The i, (https://inews.co.uk/) to which I've moved from the Guardian, did a rundown of the biasses in reporting on the referendum. The Guardian was I think the only one strongly biassed for Remain, and the Times and the i itself the only ones that were even-handed.

I agree with jamalrob: the liberal centre-left has found through the referendum campaign that it is in a vast pond of shared values with the conservatives they thought they hated. Some kind of split in the Labour Party seems in the offing. I just wish more of them would recognise they are really Red Greens like me :)

We are animals to which, some things matter. To arrive at a notion that nothing really matters (I hear a dying Freddie Mercury singing) is to have failed to notice what sorts of creatures we are.

Also, how do You quote people? I get the feeling I'm doing it wrong... — David

Click and drag your mouse across the text you want to quote, and release. Then it will magically appear in the comment box ready for you to type around it.

Mind you, it has aesthetic appeal the way you do it too.

I rarely talk about gods, even to disbelieve in them, but I was just passing :)

Any thoughts on this series? — SystemsActivated

According to Nature, there's a good Wittgensteinian preliminary answer to this: that 'reproducibility' is a mistakenly catch-all term, which actually embraces three sorts of reproducibles: methods, results, and inference.

http://www.nature.com/news/muddled-meanings-hamper-efforts-to-fix-reproducibility-crisis-1.20076

Even when we've done that, though, we're faced with the general difficulty: how does the mythology of science stand up to scrutiny if it has to forgo a simple myth of experimental reproducibility? Today I watched with a friend the NASA reports back from Juno: my friend had participated in a small way in the project. Marvellous! We can see the moons! Stuff like that just has to work, or not, as the case may be: where you're about to orbit Jupiter five years from home there's no second thoughts. That is to echo what Hanover is implying: that we have to have criteria for what findings we act upon, quality control of a much higher order than is prevalent.

Here there has to be greater openness in medical research: we've had thirty years of anti-depressants for instance based on quite a weak correlation.

Psychology and neuroscience seem to me particularly vulnerable. The lack of an underlying philosophical basis reinforces the mootness of many supposed findings in these fields; neuroscience especially has already come under attack for small samples and weak statistical methodology.

But, as BC and Hanover say, there's only a crisis if the wider world than the scientific community think there's a crisis, and this depends on PR as much as rational scrutiny.

Well, indeed, the world is going to hell in a capitalist handcart, but if you take such a broad brush line, then you will find no small steps meaningful, and you may as well join the wild optimists in the antinatal Schopenhauer clinic. I'll stand for the Greens again, and do my bit in the local community for peace and understanding, and carry on being one of those middle-class wankers who keep civil society going, however uncivil are the wild beasts unleashed by foolhardy rhetoricians.

Instead, the scrap heaped ex-workers in coal, steel, shipbuilding, etc, who have lost their cultural and economic base have seen the migrants who are necessarily more adaptable, and often better educated and more ambitious, overtake them.It is because people have lost their place in society that they are in crisis, not because other people have found a place.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-oldham-idUSKCN0ZB0LU

It's all there, ironically expressed by the son of Pakistani immigrants. He is not the problem, it must be those others. It is frankly ridiculous to blame immigrants for the neglect of the infrastructure, the lack of schools, jobs economic activity. The mills have closed and nothing has replaced them. Local government is starved of funds and central government has done nothing. — unenlightened

I live near Oldham, I have an Oldham postcode, in a post-industrial town that now is mostly a commuter town, with one big factory and a few small others, and high unemployment. You can easily find people here like the ones quoted in the Reuters article, but are they (including one voluble taxi-driver, a journalist's version of 'evidence') typical? They aren't typical of people in the town I'm in.

The quality of public debate before the referendum in the UK was astonishingly poor. So, a few slogans, the support of tabloid newspapers and a lack of good information one way or the other, and here we are, having voted to Leave, with a lot of talk about migration. (But quite a few people here hunting for Irish ancestors so they can get an Irish passport!)

All the same, I voted Leave too. I'm the Green candidate in the last local election who got more votes than UKIP! You can't make easy generalisations in this situation.

I share the view that the purportedly competing political elites have all abandoned the needs of the area where I live. The Labour party is inward-looking and mostly hand-in-glove with privatisers and international bankers, though nit retains strong core backing. Even if you think that people shouldn't blame immigration, you have to listen to them when they do, and give them a meaningful response. Negotiating a reduction in European freedom of labour movement will be a meaningful response, and to me it has to happen, whatever my own more liberal views about migration (Reader, I married an immigrant). Maybe we will also have more to spend on the health service and a better system of agricultural subsidies, when we finally stop moaning about how each other voted and get on with facing up to tomorrow.

What is the implicit message that society is trying to convey about life? — schopenhauer1

Society is not, for me, the sort of entity that sends, conveys or implies messages. But then, I'm cursed somehow by the Sartre I probably misunderstood as a youth: that once one understands the constraints 'societies' of one kind or another place on oneself, then one is free, in that melancholic way of his, either to live the inauthentic life of the socially-constrained, having seen through it, or to make the leap into freedom, however lonely and unmoored that might turn out to be.

Now that I'm quite old, I suppose I think of this existential life as something like living by the Socratic notion, that the unexamined life is not worth living. The positive implication of that: the examined life may well be worth living, if you have courage enough, and character to withstand dark times (not a character I've found it easy to cultivate, but I daresay no-one does).

Alas, those who are young at heart will become confused when the calendar marches on and glory is in the rear-view mirror. But that's ok because by this time, Nature has already produced a bumper crop of baby Kierkegaards to preside over the disintegration. — Mongrel

When the voices of children, are heard on the green
And whisprings are in the dale:
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.

Then come home my children, the sun is gone down
And the dews of night arise
Your spring & your day, are wasted in play
And your winter and night in disguise.

:)

But what I want to ask you is 'Are goodness and decency a form of incompetence?' — unenlightened

I wonder if, as in other contexts, the answer depends on the presuppositions of both the judger and the judged. Blinkered goodness and decency is unlikely to be beneficial, i.e. these purported virtues amid an inadequate understanding of the overall situation. It seems that that is the charge levelled at Corbyn by those who a bit condescendingly say they admire his 'goodness and decency'. The counter-difficulty is that those levelling the charge seem uncomprehending themselves, with that edge of self-righteousness that Tony Blair managed to make seem appealing for a while. They mostly inhabit two overlapping bubbles, the Parliamentary one and the faction-within-a-party one.

You can always join the Greens. I'm a member and even stand for local election, albeit unsuccessfully. 'So far', some say :)

Must one assume that The Elites are of one mind and so are the "Ignorant Masses"? That it's either the elite's way or the highway? Is the choice between the corporate and institutional elite and fascism? James Straub, author of the linked article, seems to think so. — Bitter Crank

I agree that that's part of the problem. As I said in another post, I voted Leave for quite different reasons from the anti-migrant line that the main campaign eventually deplorably arrived at. And the way the debate developed became falsely binary. Democratic truths are plural, but there were no institutions in place to represent, for instance, my own leftie Leave view, which never got an airing in public space. Part of the bafflement of the main political parties in the UK now - except for the Scot Nats - is that they stood for one view and a large minority of their supporters, and very many of those they wish were their supporters, took a different view.

Talking of agendas:

In Foreign Policy: It's Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses

The headline is in earnest. — jamalrob

Spooky. I'm startled by a (related) middle-class liberal reaction that there is something illegitimate about the 'leave' vote, and that the EU and Europeanness are somehow the same: that to want to leave the institution is to want to deny one's Europeanness. That isn't how I feel at all. 'Leave' rhetoric was marred by anti-immigrant talk, but 'Remain' rhetoric is marred by this blurring of identity and cartel-membership.

Well, the point I am trying to make is that there are liars for sure, but there are also very gullible buyers who believe outlandish claims on the basis of rhetoric rather than evidence. — Bitter Crank

It's another axiom of philosophy of language: the listener usually wants to make some sort of sense of what the speaker is uttering, and that may involve wide-eyed generosity.

But then, some of us are wise to that. Then there are second- and third-order illusionists, who play ironic games with their audiences. So there's a host of advertising that is knowing about mere information, that makes fun of others-not-us who are gullible, but then subtly sells snake-oil to us via this more devious route.

Here's a charming article by some hopeful psychologists who think we may be able to counter misinformation: http://psi.sagepub.com/content/13/3/106

It's not just politics. Philosophers of language have a belief that language is something to do with truth-telling, a puzzle to me as I have tried to raise before in these pages. I know that even my best friends are lying, or putting up a front to avoid truth-telling, some of the time. Talk is only sometimes about truth-telling.

Politicians in a party political system are especially hobbled, because they abide by 'party discipline', although they don't allow trade unions to do so. Quite often therefore a party politician has to argue for something they disbelieve. The effect is corrosive.

I wonder, given the lies and misinformation from the Leave campaign, e.g. over NHS funding and a reduction of immigration – things which were no doubt influential – do you think that there's reasons to reject the legitimacy of the result? — Michael

Lies and misinformation are part of any lively democratic campaign. It seems to me there are all sorts of ways in which opponents of a democratic result can construct a narrative of illegitimacy; I've certainly knocked one or two together in my time. But there's then got to be a basis of 'legitimacy'. If your basis isn't 'democracy' and you can't state what your alternative is, it's hard to see the argument.

There's a curiously entitled atmosphere among the English middle-classes, at least those posting on facebook and stuff, in the last couple of days, a feeling of shock that their 'Remain' sentiments' aren't somehow obviously right, that even democracy doesn't work if it produces this sort of result. Now the centrists among them are blaming (for the decisive working-class vote) the Labour leader Corbyn, who to me as a non-Labour supporter seemed the most honourable of any of the political elite in the whole shebang.

Practically speaking, the result is going to stand and we've got to get on with it. I'm an old libertarian socialist at heart like photographer, and although I was a Leave voter, I obviously regret that some of the things I stand for - in the environmental field, for instance - are going to be in jeopardy. But that's the price of risky change.

I have wondered, looking back, about this issue. In the 1960's LBJ, a backstairs wheeler-dealer and warmonger, nevertheless fought for and successfully enacted marvellous radical civil rights legislation. And it may be that a good and decent man, who didn't have favours to call in from racist bastards and corrupt schemers, would never have been able to do it.

Maybe the converse applies to Obama: that he isn't dirty enough to achieve what was hoped of him.

In this particular case, it does seem as if Corbyn is not a natural leader, and in a sense, that's why the electorate picked him; they distrusted anyone who had ambitions to lead them, in a new variant on the old Groucho theme of not joining a club that would have him as a member.

But I do wonder if management, a form of leadership, is in itself corrupting, yet necessary.

All this rhetoric has nothing to do with philosophy, though your remarks about this topic have undermined my interest in anything philosophical you might have to say.

In the case of the EU, it is assumed that Britain has the absolute right to decide to leave, presumably forever at any time. But Scotland does not, let alone Yorkshire, or the unenlightened household. — unenlightened

A small Yorkshire First movement hasn't gained much traction: I speak from Yorkshire, as a Yorkshireman, though I am on the border with Lancashire, so multi-cultural. :) I mean, I even like Manchester. And Liverpool.

So the decision to leave has come to pass, and the sun rose as usual. The political class are going to bogged down for a couple of years negotiating this and that, so maybe we'll have some stability. I'm gong back to Kant.

Habituation enables a creature to act in certain ways, and become more efficient at such actions - from balancing and walking to tennis shots and being virtuous. This seems like progress of a kind.

The bigger idea of 'progress' seems to me a myth. I'm glad to have been alive in a peaceful affluent society but I doubt the peace and affluence are sustainable. Knowledge accumulates in some historical periods, but eventually vandals turn up, or some ideologue burns down a library. Carpe diem. :)

The first pro-feminist thing to do might be to ask a feminist or two. Me I respond to feminism by respect, egalitarianism and gentleness.

Germany, France, Holland, Spain, Italy, and so forth all have ancient histories as States — Bitter Crank

I agree with the tenor of what you're saying. But just to mention, both Germany and Italy are not so ancient, as they only became unified states in the 19th century, which helps to explain the strong regionalism in both their forms of administration.

The way the main media are constructed, together with the fact that all the main political parties went for a Remain campaign, has meant that the Leave campaign has been right-wing, with strong whiffs of xenophobia. The leftist case for leaving has not had an airing. The quality of the debate has been poor because mainstream politicians of the centre and left have been so restrained, leaving the field to Tory versus Tory.

I'm still for Leaving: the UK belongs in a trade pact with Europe, including a deal about free movement of people, but it would be better off out of a corporatist, centralised quasi-State which now takes big political decisions - like what macro-economic policy its members are allowed to pursue if they get into big debt - that should be taken by the countries themselves. The way politics is going in some European states is worrying, and our Conservatives, in the European parliament, are allied with such dangerous people as the Polish Law and Justice party, and not with Merkel and mainstream conservatism.

There are some basics. Even the Churchlands or Dennett use the first person to describe opinions, themselves, what they did, what they thought and think, what their intentions are. So there are first person accounts.

'Mind' is a word used more by philosophers than anyone else, but if there's something illusory about it, it's still handy to have some term to describe what the creature does, from her point of view, in a mental way, even when she looks as if she's idly staring out of the window. So if you declare mind an illusion you have to reinvent something very like it to explain stuff. Quite often it seems to me that physicalists/materialists start to say 'brain' or 'nervous system' instead of 'mind', which seems to me an error. It's the human being that is conscious, deliberates, decides, speaks, moves, acts in the world, not dissectable bits of the being.

So much selves, so little consciousness. This is getting a bit off topic perhaps, but I would say that most of the time I am performing, conforming to an image that I hold onto and from that nothing new can come. But to be 'authentic' (is that the right word?) is not to make that division for a moment but to respond from the whole of what one is, and in doing so one learns - recognises -something of the truth of what one is. Unfortunately, what tends to happen is that the same process of thought immediately makes a new image of this, and one starts performing it. — unenlightened

Un, Just to say this is exactly how I feel. Thanks for articulating it in a way I haven't been able to. I would say 'authentic' too but then I'm irretrievably stuck with Sartreian categories I mis-learnt about 45 years ago.

I've toyed with this idea before. That life, or perhaps consciousness, is a good thing regardless of what is experienced.

I don't think it's a very defensible position. Nobody wants to suffer, and if they do, well, they aren't suffering. I don't think a romanticism of suffering accurately portrays what suffering is like. Or at least suffering without any meaning. — darthbarracuda

Nobody wants relentless pleasure, come to that. I was just putting the Pushkin point of view. I feel many people commit themselves to a life which partly consists of suffering, because other purposes and feelings are in their sights - they suffer for their family, for their children, for others, because endurance will they believe lead to a better life, because it's the price of the good stuff, because somebody has to shovel the shit, because they're penitent...

How did your your own character convince you of something? — shmik

Well, fiction is an odd business, to invent it you have to enter in some way into the imagination of the character you're writing about. I had set up the daughter of the (woman) protagonist to be an annoyingly-right child, so I got her (at age nine) to disrupt the household by suddenly asserting the rights of animals - throwing out clothes, refusing food, insisting on separate eating utensils from her disgusting carnivorous brother. And I just emerged from writing the situation, thinking, beyond fiction - this girl is right!

PUSHKIN:

My path is sad. The waving sea of the future
Promises me only toil and sorrow.
But O my friends I do not wish to die,
I want to live - to think and suffer...

(remarkable fact: Pushkin, embodiment of Russia, was the great grandson of a black African)

I like reading groups too though it's hard to keep up. Not enough people here read the by-month material seriously so it died. I'm about to fill a hole in my reading by reading Critique of Pure Reason if anyone's interested in a slow read. I never have understood this transcendent/al stuff so am giving it another go.

The forums have been very useful to me in a scattergun way. I'm back at college now at age 67, partly stimulated by the chat. But I steer clear of Ethics stuff mostly, both here and in academe , I don't relate to the debates. Ethics I try and do out in the world rather than talk about, based on my politics and a very simplified virtue system - do to others as you would be done by. But I dont eat meat schmik - I invented a veggie character in a story once and she convinced me :) (Sometimes tho bacon is decreed an honorary vegetable)

Plus they are also rans in the league table of mass slaughter. They have Rwanda and Congo, lately, it's true, but compared to 80000000 deaths caused by European wars in the 20th century, the Africans are just too damn peaceful. Thank goodness for civilisation.

Ceci n'est pas une phrase. (Quantum logicians need not apply)

I'm an active member of the Green Party which is supporting a 'Greener in' campaign. (There's a fair-sized and moderately influential 'Green bloc' in the EU parliament, and some skilled campaigners working to influence bureaucrats in Brussels)

Nevertheless, I'm for exit. I voted against in the referendum of the 1970's, and i'm voting against now. To me the leftist arguments for being in the thing are highly pragmatic: look what they've done for rights/the environment/poorer areas, etc.

The EU is a top-heavy network of unelected institutions with a relatively powerless Euro-parliament.

The EU policy towards the economic problems of Greece, Spain and Italy has been highly dictatorial and in support of the foolish lenders to those states, who are dominated by big banks.

Power should be distributed to the most local place where it can reasonably be exercised: that's one of my core political principles. The EU is a centripetal force opposing that.

Sadly the Labour party and the Greens have decided to campaign to remain, which has unfortunately left the Brexit campaign looking like a bunch of xenophobic reactionaries. There you go: the political elites of the UK are in a bad way.