One might ask what could be less ideological than Numbers; where language is shifty and subjective, surely Numbers offer a means of achieving some measure of objectivity? Of course not. Let us take some examples.

There is a lazy aspect to the language of the Rich that has surfaced particularly over the last couple of years in connection with a man once, and apparently now again, the richest man in the world, who need not be named. If this individual is reported to have X billion US dollars in assets, being shares in companies he has founded, then the sensible reader should know that they are being misled. It is a nonsense to ascribe a currency value to his wealth: if he wanted to liquidate these assets, the sale of so many shares, and the fact that it is the founder who is making the sale, would cause a crash in the value of those shares. There is therefore no way for this man to get X billion dollars in his hands, and so in no sense can he be said to have that much money. This is important because it demonstrates that value is a social phenomenon; value is constituted through the practices of exchange. Clearly, a man like this can borrow money against these assets, and he can of course sell some shares without significant impact on the value of the shares that he keeps, but the present writer has not seen commentators engage sufficiently with the issue, preferring to present a wild value for his wealth to thrill and scandalise the public.

Relatedly, Macdara would like, when being shown around a nice home, for the mortgagee to describe themselves as being massively in debt against the home, rather than being its owner. This is the sunroom the bank owns almost all of; here is the kitchen that will hopefully be ours in thirty years’ time. This is a particular vice of the vulture landlord class, who believe that their courageous investments in unproductive assets deserve continued reward by the Government, and who will simultaneously complain about their mortgages and yet describe themselves as owning Y number of properties, without pausing in reflection or embarrassment over the contradiction. To describe ownership as debt would bring about the same sinister clarity that we could achieve were we to describe purebred dogs as inbred, along with the attendant disgust.

Aside from money, there is another type of asset that the media likes to count, but cannot add up correctly: votes. The approach that should be taken to elections in the states of Capitalo-Democracy is to report on abstentions, blank votes and spoiled ballots; this would allow us to avoid the misleading impression created by reporting on valid votes as 100% of the total. This is particularly striking in a situation such as the last French presidential election, wherein a 58.5% share of valid votes for the winner is reduced to 38.5% when these other categories of citizen opinion are included. But this would serve to undermine the claim that can be made for the success of whichever Establishment party ends up in Government. The simplest possible messaging is the most enjoyable for the purveyors and consumers of Opinion; those of us who complicate matters by writing all over our ballot papers, or not turning up at all, must be ignored.

Of course the most egregious failure to count correctly is when it comes to Palestinian people. Newspapers spiritedly tallied the zionist dead in 2023, even generously including those who had been murdered by the zionist army in line with their policy of killing their kin if they might be taken as hostages (and presumably out of a sheer love of massacre). The papers counted up and named the zionist hostages taken. But Palestinians are so hard to count, let alone name! There are so many of them: thousands of hostages in the prisons and torture camps of the invaders; hundreds of thousands dead. And broadcasters as debased as the English Broadcasting Corporation insist on referring to the figures for the dead as having been provided by the Hamas-run Health Ministry, a scepticism absent from their lazy copying and pasting from the press releases of the zionist-run zionist government.

At a given point several months into the Genocide, Western outlets were reporting on 40,000 dead—and then…they stopped adding to the figure. The destruction of Gaza meant that no one could count the dead, which is also congruent with the desire of the cheerleaders of Genocide to reduce the number of dead in their reporting while the massacres are still ongoing. Enterprising corporate ghouls are now reporting on over 40,000 dead, or hazarding a guess at 50,000, although Trump quoted figures presumably handed to him by the CIA that revealed a US estimate of hundreds of thousands dead. This has been like some demented maths problem: the numbers of dead will not add up, no matter how often the zionists kill. The disgraceful regime toadies of the corporate media will report the estimates in a few years’ time, in neutral tones, asking who knew that Imperialism in its Final Solution phase was as bad as it was? The zionist enablers are enjoying their drinks and brunches now, looking forward to the sweetness of their future regret, when Palestinians have been annihilated. Things just went too far, they will tell each other, but you know, it can’t be undone now…

Luckily they will only need to count as far as one, when the One-State Solution is implemented: a Free Palestine, from the River to the Sea.