January has got off to such a great start where political double standards are concerned that if we all pull together we can make 2026 the International Year of Cognitive Dissonance or, as the Chinese calendar would have it, the “Year of the Duck Rabbit”.
For readers not up to speed on the Wittgenstein Duck Rabbit theory, which shows how something can be two different things at once, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein kept in his Cambridge University rooms a punt-maimed female mallard, which had the misfortune to resemble a rabbit if viewed at a certain angle through a half-full crystal-glass sherry decanter. Wittgenstein would invite guests to hold up the decanter and admire his handsome rabbit, before triumphantly snatching the vessel away to reveal that it was in fact merely a slightly disabled duck.
Germany: Duck-Rabbit optical illusion, Fliegende Blatte, Munich, 1892. Getty
Bertrand Russell famously insisted that what he had seen in Wittgenstein’s rooms was a rabbit, and that Wittgenstein must have substituted the rabbit for a duck while the celebrated public intellectual was not looking. But Wittgenstein wittily replied, in German, a language not built for jokes, “wenn es wie eine Ente aussieht, wie eine Ente schwimmt und wie eine Ente quakt, dann ist es wahrscheinlich eine Ente.” (“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck”.) The phrase of course remains common currency today, though few that use it are aware of its origin. Despite the fact that we are now all living in the World of the Wittgenstein Duck Rabbit. And here’s some reasons why.
The former Reform member and MP for Great Yarmouth Rupert Lowe, who raised hundreds of thousands of pounds to crowdfund a private inquiry into child abuse (as long as it was carried out by “Pakistani grooming gangs”), because he wanted to protect our women and girls, is threatening to sue Keir Starmer if he tries to shut down Elon Musk’s Twitter (currently X) for monetising the sexualisation of images of children.
Lowe loves Elon Musk. Indeed, the turnip-faced banker personally made over £40,000 from posting on the same child pornography platform last year, and the popular digital child-sexualisation-sluice is algorithmically engineered to spread exactly the kind of far-right talking points Lowe profits from. Looks like it’s one rule for women and girls being molested by brown Rotherham minicab-driver paedophiles and quite another for women and girls being stripped naked and pornographically posed against their will by the customers of white multibillionaire white-supremacist child-pornographer software tycoons.
Talking of which, in 2018, the British diver Vern Unsworth accused Elon Musk of seeking publicity when the billionaire offered his assistance in a Thai cave rescue. So Musk called him a “pedo guy”, and then went on to win a costly legal case that justified his insult to the diver. Today Musk’s platform is the world’s most prolific distributor of child pornography, but he has already established a precedent in law that being accused of being a paedophile isn’t defamatory, so it’s a win-win situation. Which is great for everyone that used to holiday on Epstein’s Paedophile Island. How do you like them Duck Rabbits?
It’s interesting, at this point, to note that in the 1953 Warner Brothers Merrie Melodies cartoon Duck! Rabbit, Duck!, Bugs Bunny tries to avoid being shot in the rabbit hunting season by disguising himself as a duck. The short’s writer, Michael Maltese, was forced to admit the idea had been swiped from Wittgenstein’s theory after an aggressive copyright claim by Blackwells, the publisher of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations Part II, which had come out that same year. This fact was deemed too much of a coincidence by the prosecution, but the judge, Sir Lawrence Byrne, declared that Duck! Rabbit, Duck! had literary merit in its own right, a point he was to make again in the Lady Chatterley trial seven years later.
Trump is threatening to take military action against Iran because he doesn’t like government militias executing peaceful protesters in the street, as that is wrong apparently
Meanwhile, Musk’s sometime online propaganda beneficiary Donald Trump is seeking to harness the harmless mineral-rich faerie isle of Greenland, and says the fact that the Danes “had a boat land there 500 years ago doesn’t mean that they own the land”. I wonder if Trump ever wondered what Thanksgiving was all about, or just enjoyed the turkey and the paper hats? The uncomfortable truths of American history are being erased at some speed from American public museums, and are already gone from the Ohio State University history syllabus, but it seems like they burned out of Trump’s disco-damaged brain a long time before.
The fact is that Erik the Red actually settled Greenland in AD985, 1,041 years ago. The antecedents of Donald the Orange first arrived in America in their boats in 1513, 513 years ago, half a millennium later than the Danes arrived in Greenland. But if the Danes arriving in Greenland 1,000 years ago gives them no claim to it, then Trump has doubly undermined Americans’ claim to America, as they only arrived there 500 years ago, and anyway that doesn’t make it theirs. It’s perfect Duck Rabbit politics. Not that it makes any difference. No one cares.
Carbon dating of Newfoundland’s L’Anse aux Meadows site suggests Vikings settled in Canada between AD990 and 1050. Does this make Canada Danish as well? Or does the whole region still really belong to the Indigenous people it was stolen off? Or does it belong to America just because they’ve got the most guns and bombs, and the online propaganda outlets to shape world perceptions, as long as you don’t mind a bit of child pornography on the side?
And is it any wonder the independence-seeking Greenlandic Inuit suddenly look favourably on the EU if they remember what America did to its own First Peoples? Do they fear smallpox-infected blankets, forcible sterilisation and Burt Reynolds and Burt Lancaster putting on red makeup to play Greenlanders in movies? Does being a bit Danish, and getting all that discount Lego ™®, suddenly not seem so bad?
Meanwhile, Trump is threatening to take military action against Iran because he doesn’t like government militias executing peaceful protesters in the street, as that is wrong apparently. Meanwhile, an ICE agent, his emasculation now a memory, muttered “fucking bitch” under his breath as he holstered his gun, having murdered Renee Michelle Good in Minneapolis with state-sanctioned impunity as she tried to drive away. Surely the Wittgenstein Duck Rabbit died with her.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of this year, with a further 96 dates including two weeks at London’s Alexandra Palace in February.
Stewart will also be interviewing Sleaford Mods about their new album, The Demise of Planet X, at Rough Trade in London on 20 January. Next week Nerve members will be able to access film of Stewart interviewing Sleaford Mods in Nottingham.