False dichotomies

Saturday saw me braving the coldest day in living memory which, because of my advancing age, scattiness and the long hot summer, equates to about six months. I was helping to man a stall in a shaded, draughty outdoor shopping precinct.

I was once told that I couldn’t ‘man’ a stall. The ‘acceptable’ (i.e. ‘woke’) alternative terms include: people, tend, attend, occupy, staff, or manage. Well, there’s only one of me, and ‘people’ means more than one person, so that doesn’t work. I ‘tend’ my garden, i.e. I weed, plant, prune, water, which means I nurture it. How can you nurture a selection of inanimate objects on inanimate trestle tables? ‘Attend’ or ‘occupy, implies just being present, which underplays my function. ‘Staff’ sounds as if I was taking orders, something I never do. ‘Manage’ actually overplays my function, because the whole thing was so brilliantly organized by Hubby that it managed itself. That settles it: I manned the stall. 

What stall? The annual Christmas stall (in mid-October) selling Christmas cards, tea towels, baseball caps, cuddly toys, stocking fillers, all to raise funds for the RNLI. I wasn’t supposed to be there, because the RNLI is not one of my ‘chosen’ charities, but it’s one of Hubby’s; one of his little helper-elves had  gone down with Covid so I stepped up at the last minute to fill the void.

Hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, I chatted with the punters. It was pleasant at first, but then a series of holier-than-thous showed up, making a point of buying / donating more than usual because of the appalling treatment of our brave lifeboat men and women by Danny Tommo and his Band of Balaclava’d Bros in Portsmouth a few weeks back. Fair enough. It’s one thing to protest against hordes of undocumented unvetted men of fighting age from hostile cultures invading our shores and hoovering up our resources at mega huge ginormous ‘opportunity cost’ to the settled and integrated population. It’s something entirely different to take out your fears and frustrations on lifeboat crews who repeatedly risk their lives to save all and sundry, no matter from whence they came or how reckless they might be. But when I tried to engage the Holies in conversation / ask a few questions / point out a few factual inaccuracies, I couldn’t get a word in. They were in no mood to engage, cogitate and develop. They wanted to lecture, pontificate, polish their halos and feel good about themselves. ’Twas ever thus.

“You know,” I said to Hubby during a quiet few minutes, “it is possible to admire those who man [there I go again] the lifeboats, while also questioning them facilitating mass illegal and dangerous migration into Blighty.”

Then an old boy showed up to buy some Christmas Cards. He was wearing a poppy on his lapel, one of those small perpetual metal poppies, not the flimsy paper kind they sell once a year, from round about now. This got me thinking: would it have been acceptable for the RNLI to escort boatloads of German men of fighting age heading en masse across the Channel in the early 1940s? Before I ask a follow-up question, let’s look at some stats. The Government’s own records show that between 2018 and June 2026, a total of 205,000 people (that we know of) landed in England ‘illegally’ by boat from France. Around 72% of them were adult men. Others will have arrived by plane, lorry, car, or overstayed their visas. Now then: they arrived in dribs and drabs, a few here and there, now and again. If they’d all arrived in one crossing – en masse – should that have been a cause for alarm and defensive action, attack being the best form of defense? I think so.

Here’s a similar viewpoint on another topic, prompted by a typically loaded article in The Guardian very recently. It is possible to agree that human slavery is abhorrent while not agreeing that we should pay ‘reparations’ to countries and communities who suffered. The Guardian obviously thinks it is not possible to hold both views at the same time, and they have in their sights Baron Nigel Biggar CBE – Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford and Anglican priest. He’s just one of many who object to the Church of England’s reparations’ fund. The Guardian portray him as a right wing agitator in the pocket of wealthy hedge funders, and has ‘form’, apparently. I beg to differ. I’ve read one of his books, Colonialism: a Moral Reckoning, and heard him speak in person. He’s not driven by right-wing ideology, patriotism, nationalism, ethnonationalism, populism or determinism but Christianity, contextualized historical facts, and logic. He’s a clever man. A compassionate man. Reasonable. Pragmatic. Just. I think he and Plato would get on like a house on fire.

Talking of Plato (see how I contrived a segue there?) I’m looking forward to a blissful weekend of intellectual indulgence – The Battle of Ideas – including a session on “Can [Plato’s] Socratic dialogues help us navigate ethics today?” I went to the same weekend last October and have only just stopped talking about it. I’m sure I’ll come across more examples of ‘It’s possible to support this without supporting that.’ Last year, I came away quite satisfied that it was indeed possible to support the notion of anthropocentric climate change, without agitating for North Sea oil fields to be closed down. Similarly, one can adore nature and bemoan the decline in biodiversity while supporting the continuation and expansion of man-made-and-managed landscapes rather than rewilding.

One of the sessions this weekend is entitled, “Is anti-zionism really antisemitism?” In other words, can you be hostile to the existence of the state of Israel without being hostile to Jews. Pending any new insights from the session, I’m saying no, you can’t. However, you can be hostile to the state of Israel without being hostile to Jews. Notice the difference? It’s like being hostile to France but not to the French people (apart from Macron). And I’m hostile to socialism (hadn’t you noticed?), but was best buddies with my lefty Parish Council Chairman many moons ago, and got on like a house on fire with a delightful chap from the Open University. Our minds met against a desire by some of our colleagues to follow Wales down a totalitarian path. Which particular path? you might ask: because they’ve gone down so many!

While the title and focus of this particular blog is about false dichotomies, I think most of my blogs hone in on one example or another from the usual suspects. That list of suspects is getting so long, the police would need AI to help them organize an identity parade. To recap, repeating an AI overview having opened Pandora’s box in the previous sentence: a false dichotomy is “a logical fallacy that wrongly presents only two options as if they are the only possibilities, even though additional alternatives exist. It oversimplifies complex issues by framing them as an either‑or choice when reality often includes many nuanced options.”

Indeed, should I ever tire of my blogspot title (Marmite), I might rename it False Dichotomies.