As promised, I’ll no longer be updating this site.
My new stuff will all be published at
Please do subscribe over there to get an email notification whenever I’ve deposited some of my brain-mess onto the page.
My present intention is that this site will remain here for as long as nature allows.
See you over there.
AJ
https://aljahom.substack.com/p/david-beckhams-metatarsal?s=w
I’ll be drawing a line here in the coming days, and adding a static pointer to my Substack main page.
I haven’t been able to migrate my old stuff over there because – like all zoomer tech – their migration tool doesn’t work. Presumably it’s too overloaded trying to work out what its pronouns are, so I’ll be leaving this site up for posterity, until the day it comes to the notice of one of the hairy WordPress harridans.
AJ
https://aljahom.substack.com/p/proof-that-women-are-funny?utm_source=url
Be there or be none the wiser.
AJ
In which an MSM journo gets within a country mile of the truth but misses the target by twice as far.
A very interesting column from Allister Heath in today’s Tellygiraffe (pastebin). He enumerates many of the problems we have today, and those of us with a little bit of insight will find it comforting that he’s now stating, in the mainstream media, things that many of us have seen coming for more than 20 years. He then goes wildly off the rails and in doing so, parades the panoply of delusions he labours under.
I think it’s worth dissecting as there’s a lot to unpack. We can then get to the point which Heath fails to arrive at (or at least declare in the open).
Imperialism, war, irrationality, disease and economic dislocation: modernity is ending as it began. Vladimir Putin’s monstrous expansionism is the latest, terrifying reminder that human progress is far from inevitable, and that our wealth and technological advances rest on a set of extraordinarily fragile foundations.
I think we need a definition of terms here. Specifically ‘modernity’. I’ve found several acceptable definitions ranging from the superficial (1) to the comprehensive (2). You can fill in the gaps between the two in your own time.
Based on the superficial definition, I see no reason to lament the ‘end of modernity’ and in terms of the comprehensive definition, I think modernity ended some time between the turn of the century and 2010, but that the seeds of its demise were planted in the mid 20th century.
I dispute the bald assertion that Putin’s current adventures are either monstrous or expansionist. When you have 20% of the population of the Ukraine who are ethnically and culturally Russian, and who have been subject, in effect, to rule by those culturally and linguistically foreign to them, is taking them and their land under your wing really monstrous or expansionist?
Is the NATO push into the Ukraine not a case of western expansionism? Was the US-orchestrated overthrow of the pro-Russian regime in the Ukraine in 2013/4 not monstrous?
If Putin takes the whole of the Ukraine by force, or rolls into Poland then I’ll start to ask questions and cast aspersions, but until then, is he not doing the same thing any God-fearing patriot would want to do?
Does the west have any business at all meddling in matters Ukrainian? Is the USA in any position to be posturing about ‘muh democracy’ after events of the last couple of years? As the USA’s lapdogs, and as a former imperial power, are we in the UK in any better position in this respect?
Did anyone ever assert that human progress is inevitable? Are those the same people who still think progress (i.e. forward motion) is synonymous with improvement. There’s a strong argument that the two coincided to an overwhelming extent in the second half of the 20th century, but if you’re under the illusion they are still yoked together, I’m afraid you’ve been asleep at the wheel for many years now and we’re going to have to disregard any further observations you have.
It is hard to be bullish about the next few years. As the 2020s progress, it will become obvious that our civilisation relied on a series of increasingly invalid assumptions: that genuine, destructive wars are unthinkable between major economies; that real incomes are on a permanent upwards trajectory, powered by globalisation; that technology necessarily empowers individuals; that deadly pandemics are a thing of the past, and biowarfare unimaginable; that our ever-more woke Western elites still believe in liberty, popular democracy and the rule of law.
There’s not too much to argue with here, although I’m pretty sure we can agree that we mostly noticed all these things a while ago now. Welcome to the party though, Allister… there are still some of the horse-jizz vol-au-vents left on the buffet table. And help yourself to a lovely glass of English wine.
The west has been involved in proxy wars with Russia for 30 years, mainly by the medium of bombing brown people at weddings and compelling their offspring to come to the west and either eat our lunch or to wage furtive war. Inflation has been eating incomes and globalisation depressing wages for a similar (if not longer) period, but most profoundly since the wizard notion of ‘quantitative easing’ came to the fore in 2008.
Technological advances were brought to the world by deluded utopianists… the ideas of what the internet would prove to be were grossly ignorant and it’s something I feel ashamed to have been beguiled by in my younger years, but something I think I was awake to by around 2005, having watched it start to get co-opted by governments and global megacorps. I’ve long be concerned and vocal in the real world about the total absence of reality-based ethical thinking by technology organisations. It was almost as if no-one had ever heard of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Literally nobody with a brain thought deadly pandemics were a thing of the past, having read about the various ones that regularly do the rounds in Africa, coupled with the unmissable throngs of Africans arriving on western shores. Not that we’ve just had a deadly pandemic, so let’s not let that assertion go unmentioned.
As for the idea that “our ever-more woke Western elites still believe in liberty, popular democracy and the rule of law” – well… LOL x 10 to the power of WTF. There was always one rule for them and one for us – the catalogue of examples is huge. Popular democracy? Oh sure, there were the aberrations of Brexit and Trump, but let’s face it, neither of those turned out the way the celebrants expected them to, did they?
It is now clear that 1990 was the high watermark for the principle of national self-determination and liberal nationalism.
He’s bang on the money there, though it wasn’t a clean break – there were threads of goodness that continued like the proverbial headless chicken for another 10 years or so.
Some 32 years later, Putin’s despicable Ukraine land-grab marks the final end of that period. It will make it easier for China to annex Taiwan. It will embolden Iran’s own deranged ambitions, and its pursuit of nuclear weaponry, triggering another major war in the Middle East. For now at least, America continues to protect Nato’s occasionally ungrateful members, but Russia’s action ends the pretence that a more general system exists to safeguard the independence of sovereign states. The UN, like the League of Nations before it, is irrelevant.
Like on many topics, Trump’s instinct about the UN was right. Older heads than me have been saying much the same about the UN for many many years now. Even in primary school I was taught enough about the League of Nations and the wars of the first half of the 20th Century to see that ultimately the UN would go the same way, but it’s never been more obvious than in the last 25 years or so, as UN ‘peacekeeping troops’ with no mandate to intervene stood by gormlessly as militias killed men, raped their women and enslaved their children across Africa, the Balkans and elsewhere in the world.
It’s a mistake, though, to characterise the UN as irrelevant. It’s not irrelevant to China who have used it as a soft-power vehicle to gain defacto imperial rule over Africa and global dominance in public health amongst other things. It’s not irrelevant – it’s a skin suit worn by a Chinese dragon. Chinese dominance of the UN explains a great deal of what has gone on in the last two years regarding the Wuhan ‘pandemic’.
And again, I don’t buy into the description of Putin’s actions as despicable. I see them as an inevitable response to the oppression of Russian people in the Ukraine and as the inevitable actions of a man who is faced with a weak, divided, self-absorbed, feminised, emotionally incontinent western leadership. I think Trump is right when he says Putin would not have rolled into the Ukraine on his watch.
As for NATO, if it was worth a damn to European countries, then the USA would never have had grounds to complain about them not paying their fair share into the organisation that underwrote their collective security. Oh sure, they clung to grand delusions about the EU being their carapace now, but how’s that turning out, Germany?
It’s at this point that Health’s analysis starts to go seriously off the rails.
Russia’s Ukrainian adventure is thus of far greater significance than the annexation of Crimea, or the Kremlin’s interventions in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin’s strategy this time around is much more extreme and ambitious, with echoes of Sudetenland.
That’s a pretty bold assertion and a pretty obvious flirtation with Godwin’s law. Go on, back it up. Oh. You can’t. It’s just jingoistic bluster, isn’t it? Putin doesn’t need lebensraum for crying out loud. Russia has more influence, money, land, people and natural resources than it knows what to do with.
He isn’t slaying undesirables by the million (unlike the Chinese). He’s liberating a Russian people living under continuing threat of a western takeover.
The Russian dictator’s rambling speech this week was profoundly anti-modern: he regrets the demise of the Soviet Union, and wants to rebuild an empire based on what he claims was “historically Russia”. The speech could have been delivered by any pre-1914 or pre-1939 despot. There was the fake history, the appeal to blood and soil, the blatant propaganda: it was as old-fashioned and anti-rational as it was chillingly clear. Putin is turning the clock back to the pre-nation state era.
I haven’t seen Putin’s speech, and – predictably enough – Google doesn’t seem inclined to avail me of the opportunity to do so. But have you ever heard a speech by Johnson or Biden that couldn’t be most charitably described as rambling and most accurately as manifest bollocks from end to end? If Johnson’s speeches aren’t long it’s because he’s a lazy cunt. If Biden’s are short its because he’s never more than 5 minutes away from a toilet break.
Any honest historian will tell you that every version of history – written as it is by the winners – is fake to some extent. But now we get to the biggest tell that Heath has – for all his protestations about the end of modernity – swallowed the dick of postmodernism as hard as anyone. Blood and soil. The opposite of the failed creed of civic nationalism. The indefatigable notion that people are bound together by their shared ethnic and cultural identities far more than by any lines drawn on a map by a desiccated imperial functionary. The very failure of the British empire is testament to the power of the bond between blood and soil. The current failure of Britain and the USA – and many European countries – are very largely an effect of the denial of this truth and the importation of millions of people who do not belong there.
And that – after the last two years – this man can write accusingly in a national UK newspaper about someone daring to engage in propaganda makes me wonder (not really, it’s obvious) if we should take anything he says seriously at all.
Not for nothing is RT now a long-standing media outlet in the western world. While it’s propagandistic about Russia (of course), if you want a perspective on the west that you will not see contemplated on the BBC, Sky News etc then there’s no better place to go in the mainstream media.
As for the nation-state era, if that era is defined by porous borders, supplication to supra-national bureaucrats and the handing out of passports like nightclub flyers, I’d say we’re well rid of it.
We are back in a world of competing, imperialistic great powers, where borders are redrawn in their areas of influence, ignoring international law.
Do you think he even understands any of those words he just crowbarred into that sentence? Unbelievable, Jeff.
The sorts of sanctions the West is imposing on Russia will hurt, but not sufficiently: Putin has spent years building up foreign exchange reserves and detaching his country from the global financial system. In any case the West, led by Germany but also the rest of the EU, the UK and the US, are continuing to buy some $700 million a day worth of Russian energy and commodities, according to Bloomberg.
Yes. Because Putin is more realistic, clearer thinking – of greater perspicacity and clarity of purpose – than all of the western leaders put together. Biden, Johnson, Merkel, Macron, Trudeau etc… they’re all damp, mouldering rags when held up next to Putin.
These idiots who run the west have spent the last 20 years selling the family silver to the Russians, Chinese and Arabs to pay for their programmes of ethnic replacement (a.k.a. ‘multiculturalism’), feminisation and the backward march towards mediocrity. And now we’re shocked at the outcomes? Do me a fucking favour.
For now, America still has the ability to inflict pain by cutting countries or institutions out of dollar trades, but in time its power will diminish.
Another colossal delusion. Western actions have more that incentivised non-western countries to establish their own infrastructure and protocols for financial transactions that do not depend on the fickle and failing west.
We should not be surprised, or affronted, when the Chinese and the Russians turn to these mechanisms in the face of self-defeating western stupidity. But we’re not honest, we’re not clever and we have no self-awareness. so we will be. Guarantee it. Bluster and screeching from Biden and Johnson is inevitable, like an unreliable woman who is shown the door.
The world’s financial system will divide into at least two, with one or more anti-dollar zones based around the renminbi or some other reserve mechanism. Putin and Xi Jinping’s expansionary ambitions will make this a necessity, and they will be supported by other regimes. Imran Khan, the Pakistani prime minister, is on a tour of Russia even as tanks roll into Ukraine.
Well, blow me down. Really? What a shocker. Oh my, where are my smelling salts.
The return of a Hobbesian approach to international relations will tragically be accompanied by a collapse in support for free trade and globalisation.
Go on, tell me who that will be a bad thing for. The bankers, politicians, NGO’s and the ‘elite’ or for the millions whose livelihoods have been offshored, leaving them driving a van for Jeff Bezos and shitting in a carrier bag, or prematurely pensioned off into a haze of pharmaceutical fog which itself is now being taken away from them as if they’ve been bad children who had the reckoning coming to them?
How, some will ask, can we simultaneously penalise and trade with Russia?
We can’t. ‘We’ can rattle our rusty sabres in public and privately lobby for further investment in our structurally moribund economies.
How can we tolerate Chinese technology that spies on us?
When our own governments are spying on us remorselessly (Snowden and Assange revalations passim) it’s difficult to prioritise any perceived threat to our liberty originating in China.
Do you imagine the people of Canada are more worried about the problems with Chinese surveillance, or with their own government seizing their bank accounts for acts of charity towards people who disagree with them?
When our own governments are learning and implementing the Chinese lessons on social credit systems, seizing assets and silencing dissenting voices, deploying tracking technologies, planning central bank digital currencies, there’s no sense in pointing to the east and shrieking.
How can virtue-obsessed companies continue to preach hypocritically at home while engaging with countries that persecute minorities?
Quite easily I imagine. They’re no strangers to hypocrisy. It’s two years since I wrote about taking issue with my company for trading with the Saudi government on one hand and wanking off the company LGBT forum on the other, and that was recounting an event which had happened around 2014.
What will happen to our deep economic ties with China if it invades Taiwan – and how would we cope with the massive recession and 1930s-style financial collapse a trade war would cause?
As an accelerationist, I welcome this. The entire western edifice is built on sand. The economy, the culture, the polity. Far too many people have been blithely proceeding with their heads in the sand, drunk on MSM propaganda, obsessing about gender pay gaps and diversity quotas. These people all deserve to die in a fire. When the music stops, we will find that all the chairs are occupied by people who are not white, not western and not handicapped by all the Harrison Bergeron adornments we in the west have been ostentatiously flaunting for the last umpteen years.
When the shit hits the fan, the women and the women-with-penises will turn and beg the actual men to do something, and the actual men really ought to turn their backs, as so many of us have already done. Only the ones captured by ghastly women and prisoners of their own years in denial will do otherwise.
I wouldn’t lift the TV remote to help these people, let alone pick up a weapon.
The expansion in trade and capitalism since the 1990s was one of the great boons of all time for humankind: it pulled billions out of extreme poverty, hugely improved quality of life and slashed infant mortality.
There’s bound to be some truth in this, on some metrics.
But even the headline ‘good things’ are not quite what they seem. One of my favourite statistics is that since Bob Geldof emptied our pockets for Ethiopia in 1985, when around 500,000 people died during a famine (which was largely a similar effect of communism to that seen in Russia repeatedly in the early 20th century), Ethiopia’s population has trebled from around 40 million to 120 million today, largely as a result of western and Chinese investment. The average IQ in Ethiopia is beween 63 and 69 depending on how you measure it.
Closer to home, as I’ve already said, millions of men have lost their livelihoods of engaging craftsmanship, to be replaced by a seat in a call-center, a van or a dole office.
Deglobalisation, triggered by authoritarian militarism, if and when it comes, will be a humanitarian calamity.
If that is what it takes for western countries to have an honest look at what our priorities should be, then so be it. I’ve wished for a long time that people could put down their Take a Break magazines and their football shirts and have a serious think about what really matters, but wishing does not make it so.
But while the West has largely condemned Russia’s move on Ukraine, it too is racked with its own internal ideological rejection of the modern, liberal-conservative order. Communism never really stood a chance in Europe and America, and a capitalist and democratic West thus triumphed in the Cold War; but the woke ideology, best understood as an anti-capitalist, anti-Western secular religion, has already captured much of the intelligentsia in America, Canada, New Zealand and increasingly Britain.
Let’s not beat about the bush. Wokeism IS communism in a colourful outfit. Therefore to say that communism never really stood a chance here is stupid in the extreme. It is running rampant today after a 40 year ramp up. Thatcher and Reagan were the last western leaders to fight the rearguard action against communism and they were widely hated for it by figures in culture, education and the media and the masses were gulled into hating the only people left in political life who were actually fighting for their interests.
In its extreme form, it represents a rejection of the Enlightenment, of freedom and reason; Western history is reviled as uniquely bad, rather than as a remarkable experiment in self-improvement. Individualism is replaced by collectivism and neo-feudalism, and Martin Luther King’s ideal of a colour-blind society by balkanised identity politics. Free speech is dismissed as “oppressive”. Dissenters are cancelled, with cultural institutions, capital and corporations happy to help impose this new orthodoxy. The fear is that technology will be used to increase the power of this new ruling class, rather than to liberate the masses.
I’m not handing out prizes for coming to the same conclusions in 2022 that people like me had reached 10 or more years ago. Nevertheless, it is mildly encouraging to see them articulated in the MSM. Surprisingly few middle-aged hoi polloi realise that the people pushing diversity and ‘tolerance’ today consider Martin Luther King to be an Uncle Tom who had internalised white supremacy.
The parallel rise of a related extreme environmentalism – another millenarianist movement, more concerned with self-flagellation than protecting nature – has already encouraged a series of catastrophic errors, not least the abandonment of nuclear and greater dependency on Russian gas.
Again, no prizes for stating the blindingly fucking obvious, Allister.
So what is the solution? How can we halt the return of authoritarian imperialism? How can we stop a collapse in free trade? How can we defeat the woke demagogues? I’m sorry to disappoint you, dear reader, but there are no easy answers to prevent the world from sliding into a new dark age, and perhaps even in some cases none at all.
That depends on what you classify as an easy answer. There are a few. They’re not easy for you if you are a metropolitan liberal, but if you cleave to truth, they are the easiest thing in the world.
I’m sure there are others – all equally easy for the enlightened, and equally terrifying for those who know they have spent their lives sacrificing truth and honesty on the altar of fashionable falsehood.
AJ
You weren’t expecting that, were you?
There are many many things about Diane Abbott that I despise. She’s a galumphing, innumerate race-baiter with a back-catalogue of foot-in-mouth moments more voluminous than the Encyclopedia Britannica. But she is absolutely right about this.
Can anyone be in any doubt that what is going on in the Ukraine is none of our damned business, any more than what goes on in Ireland, Canada or Mexico is Putin’s business?
I don’t claim to understand the specifics of the Ukraine situation. I’m sure Scott Horton can put us in the picture, but I don’t care because it’s none of our business.
Business is pertinent though. War is a business. It makes huge amounts of money for certain industries and individuals. It cares not for the civilians and soldiers killed, the families torn asunder, the children orphaned, the populations genocided, the despots empowered and sponsored, the displacement from regions and the consequent immigration to other countries. The industries and individuals in the war business own a selection of politicians in the UK and USA lock, stock and barrel.
The US record in war since the 60’s is terrible. In spite of having some of the best trained, most committed and talented soldiers in the world, they’re a clown show, because the lions are led by donkeys and directed by mules. In military terms, the UK is the USA’s side-bitch. We also have some talented, committed, highly trained men (not men and women, men) but their equipment is terrible and they too are led by toffee-nosed REMF hoorays who sucked the right dicks at Sandhurst and directed by politicians who are owned either by the military industrial complex or by Israel (but I repeat myself).
Both the US and the UK have committed their forces to a programme of diversity and inclusion which inevitably jeopardises their commitment to excellence. Diversity and inclusion are the enemies of any kind of excellence.
Just as with the vaccines and the previous wars and whatever other horseshit the government has up its sleeve, the media will dutifully bang the drum for the war industry, drumming up the very patriotism that they decry when it is displayed spontaneously by the lower orders.
If this situation in the Ukraine escalates, the politicians and media will all have blood on their hands again, and again, they will get rich as people die.
The legacy media, of course, is dying. Major TV news networks are getting fewer eyes to monetise than tier-2 vidcasters like Tim Pool are. CNN and Sky News cannot even dream of the sort of numbers Joe Rogan gets.
But we all remember the coverage from Gulf War 1 – CNN and others saw HUGE boosts to their viewerships. Right there is the media’s vested interest in drumming up support for war.
If you fall for it, you are a moron and – like the media, the politicians and the war industry – you will end up with blood on your hands.
And just remember: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like Tony Blair’s face.
AJ
PS. You’d have seen this a day earlier on Substack.
Can anyone even doubt it?
If there’s a hallmark of this political era it is rewards for failure. Cressida Dick will be on the red benches before you know it. Maybe not this year, or next, but soon and for the rest of our lives.
We should note and ponder the fact that it was not the shooting of an innocent Brazilian electrician that was her undoing. Nor was it her being at the helm of Britain’s flagship police force during a period where terrorism and gang violence have dominated the capital city. Nor was it the actual fact that a serving police officer on her force was a known sex pest who went on to use his police powers to abduct, rape and murder a woman.
No. Her undoing has been that there is banter in the locker rooms at police stations. People who do a grim and thankless job that must corrode their souls, and empirically confirm all the worst stereotypes about people, should not be allowed to engage in gallows humour and badinage. And they must certainly not be allowed to mock or deride the sainted classes (i.e. anyone who isn’t a white man from the 20th Century).
In a grim tussle between the forces of diversity, Sadiq the Destroyer has proven to be more powerful than Cressida the Invisible. There’s too much sexism and racism in London’s police force. This is a problem, to the man who once said that terrorism was just part and parcel of living in a big city. A bigger problem than the fact that black kids are stabbing each other to death in unprecedented numbers (another victory for Dick who was head of Operation Trident).
No, it’s the jokes about women belonging in the kitchen or the one about Indians having a dot on their heads and liking a bhajhi or two, und so weiter. Not the dead people, not the serial incompetence, corruption and lawlessness amongst serving officers. Not the standing visibly but idly by, as Extinction Deodorant or Black Lies Matter bring London to a standstill regularly for months and fell statues while violently screaming in the faces of anyone who takes issue. Not the brutal and provocative tactics of the Tactical Support Group when faced with a group that who isn’t actually in violent agreement with the government of the day. Not the harassing of regular folk over stupid covid regulations or the chilling of free speech (i.e. censorship) on social media. Not the concept of a non-crime hate incident.
I suppose it comes down to the old Al Capone stratagem. They didn’t get him for his racketeering, they got him on tax evasion. When the powers that be need to get something done, they pull the lever that’s in front of them, no matter what that lever actually does. If the outcome is what they want, it doesn’t matter how it’s arrived at.
So I’m glad Dick has finally gone. I’m sure we’ll all see her again in her Ermine. I will not be at all surprised if her successor as Met Police Commissioner is even worse. Far more politically aligned with Khan, achingly PC, just as incompetent, stridently and vocally agin’ every civilised norm that us 20th century folks cleave to. I don’t know who it will be, but the only candidate I would bet against is the white man in the running.
AJ
So, I wrote a curmudgeonly thing about technology, which I posted over at substack here.
Because you need conditioning like a cur. And we’re all grifters now. It’s our first step towards living in the grim underworld where the air runs out in Total Recall.
AJ
Admittedly, they’re rhetorical, but there we are.
From the current Tellygiraffe front page:
Don’t try and tell me they didn’t have any parties, and that it was just those awful Tories. Do not tell me that Kier Stumer, Cressida Dick, Len McCluskey, that Libdem one, the SAGE Commie, the NHS top wallah, Laura Catsarse, Emily Matalan or Beth Rigsby didn’t once attend a dinner party or drinks gathering during Wuhan restrictions.
Don’t try and tell me after all the pro-lockdown rhetoric from all these prissy, self-righteous fucks that only the government should be held to a standard of conduct, when the evidence strongly suggests that Boris was bounced into the whole pantomime by the media, the opposition, the unions, the public health dorks and the NHS, against his better judgement.
Media editors: Prove you’ve got a pair of balls and nail the government to a wall by running a front page that says “Tory Xmas Antics Prove that It Was All a Big Con”.
I won’t hold my breath. I can’t drink champagne from the bottle while holding my breath.
AJ
I’m migrating over from WordPress.com to Substack (here)
I’ve seen some noodling, self-regarding posts about why people have chosen to do just this, but for me it comes down to two things:
So there we will be. I’ll probably dual-post for a little while, but if I get to five posts there, you can consider it a done deal. I’ll have a go at migrating some of my old stuff over – at least the last few years or so. Archive.org will have to take care of the rest.
Posting will doubtless be as sporadic, vituperative and curiously worded as it always was. I’ve no idea right now whether anything about that platform will persuade me to change the formula. but I wouldn’t bet on it if I were you.
AJ
I mean… he does kinda deserve his victory lap as the narrative of the last two years shifts to be in contradiction with what we were told previously, and those of us who have stuck to our guns are being vindicated… but only in the eyes of those who agreed with us all along.
As previously explained, the normies will go to great lengths to rationalise their collaboration with the ludicrous pantomime of the last two years. They will not truly wake up. As TGO points out in an absolute Tour de Force podcast this week, if you haven’t figured out the global warming scam which has been around for 40+ years and isn’t going away, how likely are you to suddenly realise that you’ve been made an absolute twat of over the Wuhan coof for the last 2 years?
Anyway, back to Toby Young. For setting up the Daily Sceptic (formerly Lockdown Sceptics), sticking with it and making it a success, he deserves his victory lap.
Young does not deserve congratulations for having, using and cleaving to some good, empirical common sense. That is a basic requirement of being a sentient human being. Granted it’s not a requirement for being an NPC, but I don’t count them as human because they’re not.
But for seizing the opportunity to launch a successful website, he can have his victory lap. Which he does in a column in the Mail. Unfortunately, he also takes the opportunity to parade his myriad delusions about where we are and what is next. His closing line is all we need to dwell upon.
“The only thing that matters to me is that we never lock down the people of these islands again.”
The reason Toby thinks that is that he is desparate for honours… OBE’s, Knighthoods, Lordships. His father got them and he wants them too. More importantly his wife wants them, and if she thinks he’s jeopardising that, she will leave him, taking with her everything he ever loved.
And that is the reason why he’s wrong. Because if he wasn’t a gelding whose tackle is stored in an icebox in the back of his wife’s car, he would see that the ONLY THING THAT MATTERS is that every last person responsible for perpetrating this enormous crime is dragged out into the street and beaten with hammers until they are dead.
Every politician. Every ‘rock star’. Every sportsman. Every actor. Every newscaster. Every journalist. Every social media executive. Every pharmaceutical executive. Every doctor. Every ‘public health expert’. Every teacher. Every psychologist. Every Karen.
Eveyone of those people who perpetuated this clusterfuck.
Street. Hammers. Dead.
If they come quietly, their families live. If not, we’ll order more hammers.
AJ
I’m way past being optimistic, but this is a positive (if entirely predictable) step.
Not the time to rejoice yet, but to double down on opposing this lunacy wherever it appears. There are plenty of places (and placemen) around the world just in the process of putting this idea into practice.
AJ
Men of the world. We are in crisis. But we are not foresaken. We are not lost. We will not go extinct.
Because our saviour is here and it is…. a woman.
Yep…lol… The very manly Tim Stanley informs us today in the Tellygiraffe, that our saviour is just coming over the hill.
Nina Power’s book “What do men want: Masculinity and Its Discontents” will be published on 3rd Feb.
If you proceed on the assumption that masculinity is inherently toxic, she argues, you risk implying that most men are bad – and they’re not. “Far from possessing great power, men are frequently trapped in systems of other men’s making.” To be a man nowadays is “in great part, and at the risk of sounding dramatic, to suffer” – from comparatively high rates of suicide, homelessness and murder, and stereotyping.
Patriarchy might be part of the problem, as Jablonka also argues, by compelling men to live according to masculine codes that are as repressive to them as they are unfair to women, but declaring war on masculinity will only add to men’s sense of alienation, at a moment when aspects of culture and economics have moved in women’s favour. The new economy rewards brain; brawn is out of style. “It’s more fashionable to be a woman,” Fay Weldon is quoted as saying. “Women appear to be more powerful, at least among young men.”
Uh… only the dumb, timid, gelded ones, Fay, you ratty old battleaxe.
Obviously we can’t read and dissect this inevitably lumiary tome yet, but the publisher’s blurb on Amazon gives us the first clue as to the comedy shitshow of false premises that we are about to bear witness to.
From the acclaimed philosopher and author of One-Dimensional Woman, a bold, playful and open-minded exploration of the role of men in the twenty-first century
Something is definitely up with men. From millions online who engage with the manosphere to the #metoo backlash, from Men’s Rights activists and incels to spiralling suicide rates, it’s easy to see that, while men still rule the world, masculinity is in crisis.
How can men and women live together in a world where capitalism and consumerism has replaced the values – family, religion, service and honour – that used to give our lives meaning? Feminism has gone some way towards dismantling the patriarchy, but how can we hold on to the best aspects of our metaphorical Father?
With illuminating writing from an original, big-picture perspective, Nina Power unlocks the secrets hidden in our culture to enable men and women to practice playfulness and forgiveness, and reach a true mutual understanding and a lifetime of love.
I’m going to channel The Great One here for a moment and state the obvious: If you, as a man, are expecting ANY of your problems, handicaps, hindrances and hardships to be correctly identified and diagnosed – let alone fixed – by a woman, you’re probably not ready for this, but you may as well be expecting Stephen Hawking to improve your skateboarding skills.
Do you want to know how acclaimed this woman’s ONE OTHER BOOK is?
It was published 13 years ago. It was 81 pages long. Eighty-one. Pages. John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged in longer than that, and that’s one speech… It garnered 27 ratings, only 12 of which were accompanied by reviews. In 13 years.
There are 1440 books of feminist criticism and 10456 books of philosophy that have had more traction than Nina Power’s last book.
Do you want to know how acclaimed she is as a philosopher?
Power received her PhD in philosophy from Middlesex University on the topic of Humanism and Antihumanism in Post-War French philosophy, and also has an MA and BA in Philosophy from the University of Warwick. She has taught at Middlesex, Orpington College, London College of Communication, Morley College. Power also worked as a Tutor in Critical Writing in Art and Design at the Royal College of Art, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the British Philosophical Association.
Those academic institutions probably don’t mean much to anyone outside of the UK, so let me assure you: they don’t mean anything to anyone inside the UK either. And note that it doesn’t say WHAT SHE TAUGHT at those places. I’m going with crochet, or interpretive basket-weaving. But not philosophy.
Something is definitely up with men. From millions online who engage with the manosphere to the #metoo backlash, from Men’s Rights activists and incels
Okay, honey, if you say so. Of course it’s completely unprecedented that men band together with other men to exchange ideas, drink, fight, cause and solve all their problems. You’re bound to conclude that something is definitely “up with men” if we say “hold up there, you hypocritical, bandwagon jumping, victim-status seeking, wall-hitting, metoo grifting, money-grubbing ho.”
And there were never any incels before 2014 who heard a kerfuffle of women coming over the hill and said “Fuck that noise. Train sets, anyone?”
spiralling suicide rates
Come now… be honest. Are suicide rates really spiralling? Or have they always been 4x higher for men on the grounds of their capacity for actually getting the job done? And where suicides are spiralling, are they not more to do with the hollowing out of the middle and working class jobs in vast swathes of the west, and the medical retirement of millions of superfluous men into a Fentanyl wonderland? And isn’t a great deal of this being driven by women who demand to be in the workplace and for the workplace to be made into their own little knitting circle? And that having eliminated the possibility of actually creating any goods in the west, all the skilled jobs were sent to China and India? Only the women’s jobs (HR, marketing, PR, receptionist) remain.
it’s easy to see that, while men still rule the world, masculinity is in crisis.
Okay, Nina. So far, so sketchy.
How can men and women live together in a world where capitalism and consumerism has replaced the values – family, religion, service and honour – that used to give our lives meaning?
Oh boy there’s something to unpack here, okay.
If capitalism and consumerism were king, would we have spent the last 2 years shutting down the economy and hiding in our houses, in our PJs, watching Netflix?
No, because emotionalism, safetyism, hypochondria and pathology are king, aren’t they? The four horsemen of the boomerpocalypse.
Is your book, Nina, going to explore who may have been responsible for the dissolution of family and religion, the debasing of service and honour? I somehow think it will not.
Feminism has gone some way towards dismantling the patriarchy, but how can we hold on to the best aspects of our metaphorical Father?
So, having dismembered your father, you now think it’s a good time to discuss how to store the best bits of him in some kind of useful stasis? “Oh Maggie, he always had a good heart. Let’s put it in the glass-fronted chiller cabinet where we will always have it close to us.”
With illuminating writing from an original, big-picture perspective, Nina Power unlocks the secrets hidden in our culture to enable men and women to practice playfulness and forgiveness, and reach a true mutual understanding and a lifetime of love.
I know you don’t want to believe this, but WE FUCKING HAD ALL OF THAT BEFORE YOU RANCID CUNTS STARTED DISMEMBERING EVERYTHYING.
So, I’m looking forward to this book, and either I’ll be very pleasantly surprised (at how peaceful I find things now that my balls are in a velvet pouch in a lawyer’s client account) or I’ll be taking this audacious grifting bitch apart, piece by piece.
If you can’t wait and you want to get an idea of what’s ahead, just read Nina Power’s wikipedia entry.
AJ
I kid, obviously. There is nothing new. Two years in and everything is still due to covid.
Due to a serious technical fault, I read a piece in yesterday’s Telegraph by Allison Pearson. She’s been pretty sound throughout this business, has Allison. Perhaps not as resolute and uncompromising as I have been, but she’s top tier.
She writes movingly and compellingly about some of the episodes people were experiencing on May 20 of 2020, as we were under the lockdown boot while Boris and his chums had bottle parties in the Westminster village of the damned.
The missed rites of passage, the lost social engagements, the separated loved ones, the cancelled medical care, the dying alone, the inhumanity of a mid-covid funeral.
People are angry about those things now they know what they now know. “Never again” says Allison.
But now is too late to start getting angry. The time to get angry was the very minute restrictions were imposed and the blanket of propaganda started to smother us. A good number of decent people pointed out at the time how utterly fucking outrageous, authoritarian, inhuman and futile all of this shit was.
But for 2 years, we were condemned. Conspiracy nuts, anti-social, a danger to society, killing grandma. We were told in red-faced shouty, hectoring terms that we needed knuckle under, pull together, put on a useless mask, get an experimental injection (or 3) and do what’s best for the common good, which meant listening to the government and the BBC. It meant clapping for the NHS. It meant pulling out our own teeth and beating cancer with a good old-fashioned stiff upper lip. It meant closing our businesses and suspending our livelihoods. It meant closing schools and cancelling the exams on which children’s futures rest. It meant sitting helplessly 2 metres from our mother as she sat isolated and sobbing at our father’s funeral. All for the common good.
All the words about education, education, education no longer count quite so much.
All the plastic straws and bags may be gone, but a billion disposable masks will be fine for the sea turtles.
Disability rights matter – for the deaf, the autistic, the immobile – except when they don’t.
You can’t leave your house, but flights are still arriving from Africa, Asia, America.
You are instructed to disinfect your shopping bags and to quarantine your Amazon parcels in the porch.
The police are fining people for having coffee together on a park bench, dying reservoirs black, throwing old ladies to the ground and arresting them, sending a van full of paramilitary pigs to check that a teenage girl is at home quarantining.
You are expected to routinely stick a swab up your nose and down your throat, as if this is somehow normal.
Repeat after me: “Bitch, What The Fuck? No. I’m not doing it, and you are a fascist imbecile if you are insisting on it”.
A VAST majority of people simply refused at the time to say “this is wrong, I’m not doing it and I condemn anyone who collaborates with this insanity”. Because a vast majority of people are spineless simpletons with the memory of a goldfish who used to be a boxer. They’d rather join forces with the big thick bullies who take it upon themselves to socially enforce whatever ludicrous nonsense a minister most recently dreamt up in the bath.
Just how the fucking hell are we going to ensure that this was a “never again” event, when we know that the great many are cowardly imbeciles who hate the heretics with all the zeal of someone who conveniently doesn’t remember the 20th century, let alone those that went before?
“Never again will the hypocrites take us for fools” she says.
Motherfucker, every time you vote they take you for a fool. Your vote doesn’t count. Your MP does not and will not represent your concerns. They represent their jobs,their promotions, their peerages, their chums from Oxbridge and Eton, their lobbyists, their media appearances and their asinine political hobbyhorses.
When you were on the doorstep clapping for the NHS at the very same time that you couldn’t get any of your own family’s health issues addressed, did it never occur to you that this was insane and that you were being taken for a fool?
When Boris Johnson said “3 weeks to squash the sombrero”, “Hands, Face, Space” and “social distancing”- did you not feel then that you were being taken for a ride?
When you saw the one way systems in shops and the shouty, megaphone wielding, fluorescent vest wearing Karens? Did you not….
When Neil Ferguson was caught nobbing his fat side piece? Or Matt Hancock? When Dominic Cummings went for a little drive to Castle Barnard? Did you not once wonder if you were having the piss taken out of you?
If you’ve watched politics for 10 years – any 10- years in history – and you still haven’t worked out that they are taking you for a fool, you need to be put in a wood chipper or fed to pigs.
Remember voting for Blair in 1997, as a traditional working class Labour voter then watching him proceed to screw you over by importing millions of cheap labourers? Remember believing in nuclear disarmament and unilateral peace, then watching him confect a pretext for us to launch a Holy War against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan?
Remember watching as Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were given devolution while us English simply retained responsibility for paying the bills?
Remember Gordon Brown plundering your pension and raising your taxes to pay for it all? Remember Brown’s rhetoric at the time of the Banking crisis? ‘No time for an amateur’? And the bailouts? Oh the bank bailouts and the perpetual money printing.
Remember voting for the Lib Dems in 2010 and watching Cleggo get into bed with the Tories? Remember them campaigning on no VAT increases – a promise that was broken almost immediately that Clegg got into bed with Cameron? I expect you had reservations about the continuing warmongering, too, don’t you?
Remember voting for Cameron as a Tory, and watching him – in spite of his prior rhetoric – embracing the green blob and pursuing all the same costly multiculti crypto-socialist policies that we hated Blair for?
Remember the Tory crowing when Boris won the leadership and won his general election? Oh how things would be different now.
I’m sure you could say simlar about the governments of every party and PM going back to Robert Walpole and before.
Just consult a search engine and have a look at how many times in recorded history journalists have used the words “never again”.
But you always get fooled again, don’t you? And they WILL take you for fools agin, won’t they? Because – most of you – you ARE fools, aren’t you? Fools of the worst, most vile, vicious and pathetic kind.
Alexa, call in the motherfucking meteor strike.
AJ
I’m reposting this letter which was enclosed in Tom Woods‘ daily email, as it’s absolute dynamite. It’s written by an Israeli scientist, but I think every single word he’s written is applicable across the world.
Props to Tom Woods for passing this on. If you want an interesting snippet each day from one of the world’s most intellectually honest, decent and wholesome people, subscribe to his list. It’s the only one I get any more as it’s the only one that’s genuinely valuable and doesn’t overload with tat.
Udi Qimron, head of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Tel Aviv University and a leading Israeli immunologist, has taken the opportunity posed by the collapsing narrative to release this open letter to the authorities (this is a mechanical translation from the original Hebrew):
Ministry of Health, it’s time to admit failure
In the end, the truth will always be revealed, and the truth about the coronavirus policy is beginning to be revealed. When the destructive concepts collapse one by one, there is nothing left but to tell the experts who led the management of the pandemic – we told you so.
Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail. You do not admit it, because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years, but in retrospect it is clear that you have failed miserably in almost all of your actions, and even the media is already having a hard time covering your shame.
You refused to admit that the infection comes in waves that fade by themselves, despite years of observations and scientific knowledge. You insisted on attributing every decline of a wave solely to your actions, and so through false propaganda “you overcame the plague.” And again you defeated it, and again and again and again.
You refused to admit that mass testing is ineffective, despite your own contingency plans explicitly stating so (“Pandemic Influenza Health System Preparedness Plan, 2007,” p. 26).
You refused to admit that recovery is more protective than a vaccine, despite previous knowledge and observations showing that non-recovered vaccinated people are more likely to be infected than recovered people. You refused to admit that the vaccinated are contagious despite the observations. Based on this, you hoped to achieve herd immunity by vaccination — and you failed in that as well.
You insisted on ignoring the fact that the disease is dozens of times more dangerous for risk groups and older adults, than for young people who are not in risk groups, despite the knowledge that came from China as early as 2020.
You refused to adopt the “Great Barrington Declaration,” signed by more than 60,000 scientists and medical professionals, or other common-sense programs. You chose to ridicule, slander, distort and discredit them. Instead of the right programs and people, you have chosen professionals who lack relevant training for pandemic management (physicists as chief government advisers, veterinarians, security officers, media personnel, and so on).
You have not set up an effective system for reporting side effects from the vaccines and reports on side effects have even been deleted from your Facebook page. Doctors avoid linking side effects to the vaccine, lest you persecute them as you did to some of their colleagues. You have ignored many reports of changes in menstrual intensity and menstrual cycle times. You hid data that allows for objective and proper research (for example, you removed the data on passengers at Ben Gurion Airport). Instead, you chose to publish non-objective articles together with senior Pfizer executives on the effectiveness and safety of vaccines.
Irreversible damage to trust
However, from the heights of your hubris, you have also ignored the fact that in the end the truth will be revealed. And it begins to be revealed. The truth is that you have brought the public’s trust in you to an unprecedented low, and you have eroded your status as a source of authority. The truth is that you have burned hundreds of billions of shekels to no avail – for publishing intimidation, for ineffective tests, for destructive lockdowns and for disrupting the routine of life in the last two years.
You have destroyed the education of our children and their future. You made children feel guilty, scared, smoke, drink, get addicted, drop out, and quarrel, as school principals around the country attest. You have harmed livelihoods, the economy, human rights, mental health and physical health.
You slandered colleagues who did not surrender to you, you turned the people against each other, divided society and polarized the discourse. You branded, without any scientific basis, people who chose not to get vaccinated as enemies of the public and as spreaders of disease. You promote, in an unprecedented way, a draconian policy of discrimination, denial of rights and selection of people, including children, for their medical choice. A selection that lacks any epidemiological justification.
When you compare the destructive policies you are pursuing with the sane policies of some other countries — you can clearly see that the destruction you have caused has only added victims beyond the vulnerable to the virus. The economy you ruined, the unemployed you caused, and the children whose education you destroyed — are the surplus victims as a result of your own actions only.
There is currently no medical emergency, but you have been cultivating such a condition for two years now because of lust for power, budgets and control. The only emergency now is that you still set policies and hold huge budgets for propaganda and consciousness engineering instead of directing them to strengthen the health care system.
This emergency must stop!
Amen to that.
AJ
So of course they had to get Blair’s knighthood in before that becomes law.
As if Delingpole needed to underline my previous point for me, here he is again, stating the fucking obvious:
At least he gets that it’s not unprecendented…
A few years ago, the notoriously crooked Prime Minister Harold Wilson produced what was infamously known as the ‘Lavender List’ of thoroughly undeserved gongs for outrageous cronies.
Look, James… the Lavender List was not ‘a few years ago’. It was 45 years ago. FORTY FIVE YEARS AGO.
If I make a new year’s resolution, it should be to stop sniping at Delingpole. But I just can’t help it. Like scratching eczema or playing with a loose tooth.
How can anyone – and there are a lot of them out there if Twitter is a gauge – stil be surprised at the periodic establishment trollfest that is the honours list?
It’s been a majority shitshow for as long as I can remember. It has always been a mutual back-slapping club for the establishment – a core part of their carrot & stick repertoire.
So, as deplorable as it might be that Miranda Blair got a top knighthood, as do all former PMs, if you’re acting surprised you’re either a moron or a fake.
AJ
Just for the headline, like.
I just don’t know how this man has made it this far into life with so little self-awareness.
So many haven’t covered themselves with glory this year. Here are my biggest disappointments of 2021:
The Mainstream Media (That I spent 30 years of my career in)
Scientists (Who I’ve spent 20 years arguing with about climate change)
Medics (Who I previously eschewed in search of effective alternative treatments for my illnesses)
Libertarians (Of whom I was never one because, until 3 minutes ago, I was a committed Tory boy)
The Conservative Party (lol)
The Archbishop of Canterbury; The Pope (Now I’ve suddenly and ostentatiously ‘found God’ I feel empowered to curse the figureheads of the establishment I’m now cleaving to)
All the idiotic celebrities, politicians, journalists who allowed themselves to be roped into the government’s campaign to vilify people who don’t want get vaccinated.
Brexit (I never imagined our political class could contrive to twist it into something that would benefit them and not us)
Boris Johnson
I mean… really? You went into 2021, in your 50s and you thought any of these would not turn out to be terrible, on the evidence of the last 20 years?
After all, this is what he says about our esteemed Prime Minister:
From his chummy, affected nickname (his real name is Alexander) to his japesome Telegraph articles celebrating breast implants and BMWs, Johnson is, and always has been, an elaborately constructed fraud. The pity is that most of us (me included) hoped there was something real beneath the facade and didn’t realise the truth until he was inextricably entrenched and the damage had been done.
Today, Boris “always has been a fraud”.
But who can forget the before times? Well, Delingpole sure can.
I could forgive this of a blogger – someone like myself who has never been in the same postcode as Boris Johnson. But Delingpole had spent the previous several years telling us – ad nauseum – how he went to Oxford with Boris, amongst other self-serving chancers whose names are in every political story of the last 2 years. Now, you might think “well, if one of his Oxford contemporaries can’t suss him out, what chance does a prole like me have?”
Except we did figure him out, didn’t we? Long before Delingpole stopped being a greasy-pole establishment lickspittle and suddenly decided that his future was in pointing and shrieking and being outraged at the grotesque betrayal of the country by ALL OF THE PEOPLE WHO HE WAS AT UNIVERSITY WITH.
Just fuck off, James.
AJ
It’s be rude not to, eh?
Roughly speaking, I’ve included anything that is evens or better, so if I get half of them right, it’s in line with expectation.
That should do it for now.
AJ
Wait for the inevitable argument that “blacks and asians in this country have far lower rates of vaccination because they – with some historical justification – distrust the government and the doctors. Therefore as a white, it’s your duty to be vaccinated in order to hit the numbers for herd immunity, thus helping to protect unvaccinated minorities. It’s be racist to do otherwise.”
Justin Trudeau (who else?) in December 2021:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told a Quebec television station people who do not get vaccinated against COVID-19 are often racist and misogynistic extremists.
But he said the people of Quebec are not the problem and questioned whether the rest of Canada needs to “tolerate” the unvaccinated.
Imagine that.
AJ
I rather enjoyed this.
Intelligent, balanced, absolutely cutting to the chase and at no point did the tweeters leave my speakers and embed themselves in the wall, like they do most of the times women are talking on the internet.
I read Laura’s book during a period I wasn’t really engaged with the online thing, and she’s probably the soundest lay advocate and communicator we have on our side. Even with a Star Trek replicator, you couldn’t bring enough Delingpoles to make one Laura Dodsworth.
AJ
Al Jahom's Final Word 