It may take a very long time for this to come out, and I’ve no evidence to support my hypothesis at present, but I’ve been around a while, so mark my words.
One day we will discover that Justin Welby has a deep dark secret that, if known, would render him unfit to be in society, let alone in high church office.
AJ
That is, I think, a more pertinent reframing of the question “Why is the vaccine uptake lower amongst some ethnic minorities?“
I think we are probably well aware of why black and south Asian people are reticent. They don’t trust the establishment, and they are correct not to do so.
Vaccine hesitancy in some ethnic minorities, because of past institutional racism and poor experience of public services, is not new and there is evidence supporting their genuine concerns. When interpreting low vaccine uptake, in predominantly Black communities especially, history profoundly matters. There are historical ethical violations, including the Depo-Provera study, conducted in East London in 1979, where a 14-year old Black girl was administered the contraceptive, without consent, while under general anaesthesia. [13] When questioned, the administering physician responded that as “a citizen of this country…it was his moral duty to do so”. [13] Depo-Provera was also trialled on Asian women without their knowledge or consent, leading the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent to launch the Campaign Against Depo-Provera.[13] Similarly, in the US, the 40-year Tuskegee syphilis study was conducted on Black men without informed consent until whistleblowers ended it in 1972; the diseased men were left untreated, with large numbers suffering and dying, even when penicillin became the drug of choice in 1947. [14]
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/04/08/what-is-behind-the-low-covid-19-vaccine-take-up-in-some-ethnic-minorities/
I’ve been watching our establishment closely for more than two decades now and I don’t trust them either, but it seems to me that the common thread with those I know who have succumbed to the stabotage is that in spite of a lifetime witnessing cock-up after cock-up, conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory becoming established fact, corruption, lobbying, the revolving door between Downing Street and C-suites, they still trust these fuckers enough to let them inject a novel drug with unknown long-term effects.
It just makes no sense. Perhaps comfortable middle-class white people are more prone to hypochondria and fear generally, more than those who live at the coal-face of risk and peril.
Naturally, things being as they are, there’s a great deal of hand-wringing and talk of the need for understanding, empathy and engagement with ethnic minorities who are resistant to the pleas to get vaxxed. We wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings after all.
But no such regard exists for the white working classes who are similarly aligned on the hesitancy front. And because by sheer numbers this is the largest group, pundits and politicians feel free to generally hurl insults at the ‘selfish unvaccinated’.
It’s tempting to say ‘oh well, there we are then, it’s thick people and poor people who are unvaccinated’, but some research findings indicate that the most highly educated people are also more hesitant than those with a moderate level of education. Similarly, there are indications that people working in healthcare are more reticent than your average Joe. I mean… if a significant number of people who work in healthcare have concerns, what can that possibly tell us? And although some of this data is now old, stories continue to circulate that predict a massive staffing problem for the NHS when the jab becomes manadatory for healthcare workers.
So where do you go from there? Are people who work in healthcare thick and poor? Do you want to make that your next move after spending 6 months clapping on your doorstep for these heroes and angels?
How about a correlation between working in healthcare and – on the basis of grim experience – lacking trust in government and pharmaceutical companies? That would make some sense. They see the mistakes, the negligence and the neglect every single day. They succeed at healthcare – in so far as they do – in spite of the government, and the NHS organisation, and not because of it.
So to bring us back to the titular question, it’s very clearly ‘not all white people’, but it does seem to be the comfortable middle who are insulated from the worst failings of the government, but are not sufficiently well educated to have a firm grasp on the significance (or otherwise) of the blizzard of statistics we’ve been treated to over the last two years.
AJ
In the face of the latest round of blaming the vaccine-free, as an accelerationist and all round awkward bastard, it is perhaps tempting to say “go on then, lock down the unvaxxed – it won’t make any difference to me at this point.”
But we know exactly what would happen. The same as happened with lockdowns and masks: the numbers will already be trending downwards by the time we lockdown the unjabbed, the numbers will continue to decline after this, and it will be taken as proof positive that it’s the unvaxxed are indeed the problem, and assertions will be widely made that things would have been a great deal worse if the government hadn’t taken this decisive action.
Never mind that Austria already tried that and still felt the need to subsequently lock everyone down. Never mind that thanks to vaccine passports, other places (Germany, Netherlands, New York etc) already have a de facto lockdown of the vaccine-free, so there are already case studies showing that it has not been effective.
Never mind that Israel (who were first to talk of a 3rd ‘booster’ shot, and were followed dutifully by every other country) is now talking of a 4th shot. Which speaks really well of the efficacy of the vaccines, does it not? The US CDC is now selectively rolling out 4th shots and the big man at Pfizer has said Omicron ‘may’ mean people need a fourth shot sooner than expected.
People who took the jab are now heavily invested in believing that the vaccines work, for various psychological reasons that have been discussed at length. So, even this news of a 4th jab will not persuade them that the vaccines are ineffective, and news of ‘rare’ side effects is just not cutting through. Nor is any analysis that gives the lie to claims that the vaccine-free are swamping the NHS.
Therefore, against my every instinct, the very last thing I would think of doing at the moment is giving it the big “COME ON THEN”.
AJ
Update: Germany is going ahead with fourth jab.
Update 2: UK considering same.
I think this encapsulates the problem we have on ‘our side of things’.
Delingpole is basically erratic.
In my estimation, due to his protracted butthurt over having been so wrong about Gove, Johnson and Rees-Mogg, he’s swung wildly to another extreme. One only has to look at his guests over the last couple of dozen podcasts. Woo-merchants, space cadets and tin foil hats are becoming a staple. For a man in his 50’s he’s acting awfully like a 16 year old politics student who’s just read No Logo by Naomi Klein and then moved on to some Deepak Chopra.
Ben Irvine, on the other hand, has homed in with great perspicacity on one specific issue, namely how the public sector unions threated to make Boris fuck a pig on live TV unless he shut down the schools and called a lockdown. I’m paraphrasing.
Now, I’ve no doubt that what Ben tells us is basically true, and I accept the fact and its importance. But I don’t believe it was the sole contributing factor.
Equally, a lot of what Delinpole says is true. We all agree that Bill Gates is the new George Soros. using his money to peddle influence at the supernational level, with media, governments and other loci of power. We can also agree that Gates has a track record as a business man who – per force – learned that if he wanted to do what he wanted to do he needed to spend billions on lobbying to keep the lawmakers on side. And that Gates had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. We can all agree.
But so what? What does this information actually mean to us at the grass roots level, and what change can we effect? None, and ‘Format our C: drives’?
We can also agree that pharmaceutical companies are – per force – motivated to a very great extent by money, and that they also spend a great deal of money on lobbying and PR and marketing to smooth things over so that they can do what they want. And they do have some pretty shabby episodes in their past. Again though, what does that mean to us here in the UK in our little houses in our little towns? Nothing. And what can be do about it? Boycott paracetamol?
But what about WEF, Davos, Klaus Schwab.. blah blah blah… even if it’s true (and it is) it’s too far removed from most people’s lived experience for it to be a sensible tool of persuasion. Every ordinary person understands and accepts that the most wealthy and powerful people in the world all scratch each other’s backs, and getting mad at the fact hurts no-one but yourself.
You may as well start a campaign against gravity and refuse to come out of your bedroom until Papa accedes to your demands.
As for the 5g-causes-covid, nanobots, magnetised by the vaxx, covid isn’t even real and all that shit… well.
James thinks that normies can still be won over even if you surround yourself with people who believe in the power of crystals, astrology and alien overwatchers, and think 5G mobile tech is the devil’s broadband.
Ben disagrees with him. As do I, and as I’ve written a couple of times before (1) (2).
Being seen as adjacent to nutters has been a hindrance in every normie conversation I’ve tried to have regarding the problems with all of the Covid measures from masks to vaccines to mandates and passports.
Yes, Ben is a little monomaniacal, because he’s stumbled upon something important and he’s frustrated that people aren’t paying the heed he thinks his discovery deserves. But his point is important, and the thing that differentiates Ben’s point from those regarding Bill Gates or Pfizer or the WEF is that it’s local. We can influence it in this country at the local level, amongst our friends, relatives, colleagues, MPs, councillors, local businesses etc.
The likes of the Times, Spectator, Telegraph, Daily Mail, could quite easily be persuaded that a campaign exposing the unions and holding their leaders to account is something they could do as part of a ‘clean hands’ exit from the clusterfuck of the last 2 years and they could use it to kill off Boris in favour of Sunak or Truss before the next election. A Tory government could then be quite easily persuaded that getting tough with unions would win them back the support that has ebbed away over the course of this year.
So, while it’s frustrating that Bill Gates is who he is, and Klaus Schwab is who he is, and the pharmaceuticals are what they are, and they all went to Jeffrey Epstein’s island, you gotta let it go. When it comes to the day-to-day skirmishes that we have to fight and win, all that bigger picture stuff is just a futile distraction. It’s almost as if the enemy places these things into the picture to distract us from the bits we have a hope of actually moving the needle on.
Focus on where we can bring pressure to bear here in the UK, amongst the media and politicians who are most likely to be amenable the topic Ben brings to the table.
And any other meaningful local efforts are good too. Support businesses that are prepared to preserve normality. Chuck a few quid to people and groups that you think are doing worthwhile things.
I don’t think the marches will ever do anything to sway public or political or media opinion on aggregate, but they sure are good networking opportunities for people who don’t buy into the status quo, and god knows there are enough out there at every level who want us to think we’re isolated and completely outside of normality. In that respect alone, they are worth supporting, attending etc. Just don’t get in a fight with the coppers and don’t expect the event itself to bring change. It’s mostly just a networking opportunity.
The only reason to accept the loonies into the conversation is if you buy into the narrative that we the sceptics are indeed a tiny minority of helplessly isolated people right on the margins.
And one look at the actual numbers of vaccine-free in the country tells us we are not. We are millions strong.
AJ
UPDATE: Via Vox Day, my attention is drawn to the Mid-December (Week 50) UKHSA report, which states the following on page 3:
The numbers are crunched here but I’m not sure I agree with the analysis as the statement is ambiguous. That number could be of the total population, including those under 12 who are not eligible, which would leave us with a number of a little more than 5million eligible-but-unstabbed. It’s still not a small number.
The damage the vaccine-free are doing to society.
Tell me, Mr Health Secretary.
Was it the unvaccinated who discharged tens of thousands of elderly patients into care homes without regard for the possibility that they had covid – a primarily nosicomial disease?
Did we also put restrictions in place that resulted in an elderly couple who had been married for 63 years being kept apart from one another for more than 3 months, during which time they could only wonder if they would ever see one another again?
Perhaps we physically prevented grieving people from comforting one another at their relatives funerals?
Or maybe we cancelled hundreds of thousands of cancer screenings and other health screenings?
Could we have been the ones who ordered all dentists to close shop, completely disregarding the urgent needs of people in a great deal of pain with dental issues?
Maybe we closed the schools and caused the education of a whole generation of children to fall into disarray?
Maybe we are to blame for the hundred thousand children who have now disappeared from the system completely, into who knows what?
Perhaps we introduced the restrictions that lead to a huge surge in demand for help from domestic abuse charities?
Perhaps we prevented millions of people in already tenuous circumstances from opening their business or earning a living?
Perhaps we are they who flagrantly and repeatedly flouted our own rules? Or am I thinking of Neil Ferguson (1), Matt Hancock (2), Dominic Cummings (3). Allegra Stratton (4), Boris Johnson et al (5)?
Perhaps we printed hundreds of billions of pounds which was pumped into the economy, a great deal of which was claimed fraudulently and then written off? Therefore we must be responsible for burgeoning inflation, the likes of which we haven’t seen for a generation or more, eroding savings and investments, squeezing the poor and elderly on fixed incomes? Are we also the ones adding insult to injury by imposing the highest rates of tax seen the UK for more than 40 years?
Of course, it was also the unvaccinated who conspired with behavioural psychologists (including an out and proud communist) to plunge the UK population into a protracted bout of fear-driven mass psychosis.
I think the conclusion I’m coming to – after much deliberation – is that Sajid Javid is a vile and disgusting piece of shit, who should be fired into the fucking sun with a size 12 boot up his arsehole.
AJ
I need to hold my hands up here, I suppose. It’s only a matter of days since I wrote a piece in which I stated my belief that people are not waking up.
Since then a couple of things have happened that mean I need to finesse my position, and maybe apply a little of the nation’s favourite post-hoc rationalisation.
So convinced was I that people are not waking up at all, I put money on the Tories to hang on in that by-election the other day. And boy did that not go the way I (or the bookies) expected.
Then, I had an enlightening conversation with an old friend. Let’s call her Kate.
Kate is the normiest of normies. BBC, Sky News, The Times, voted Tory for her entire life. She’s from a high-brow scientific background and works in a cutting-edge engineering field that is very much cheek-by-jowl with the government’s trade & industry people.
She wears her mask, had her jabs and clamoured for her booster, which she duly got.
She’s not a particularly political person, and not being steeped in the art and history of political debate, when such topics are broached, she tends to oscillate between shutting it down and vehemently parrotting whatever The Times is saying, which she considers – as the paper of record – to be a primary source.
I’ve had to defend myself more than once against inferences by her that I’m a conspiracy nut. We’ve all been there.
So I was rather blindsided by her statement last night that she was not at all surprised at the by-election result, and that as things stand she could never vote Tory again until Johnson goes. I was even more surprised by her statement that she no longer trusts the BBC to be fair, honest or impartial. She even spoke positively about the new opinion polls which are showing increasing resistance to further covid measures.
However, she bridled strongly against my assertion that the government has spent the last 2 years gaslighting us and taking us for total fucking idiots.
And so maybe this is the sort of awakening we are going to see. The one where Johnson and his government are a total disgrace and absolute shambles, who cannot be trusted, and the BBC has lost the dressing room, but still the masks work, the vaccines are vitally important and the hokey kokey everyone has enthusiastically partaken of for the last 2 years has been necessary and proportionate. But no more.
Kate has growing but scrupulously non-specific grievances with the ‘fucking incompetent’ government. Because if she were to get too specific, she’d have to start reasoning it through and the conclusion that she’s been made an idiot out of would be unavoidable.
Thus, as I did actually predict, people will find a way out of this that involves blaming someone (e.g. Johnson & the Tories, the vaccine-free, the BBC) and completely avoiding having to confront their own displays of cowardice, credulity, bigotry, cruelty and magical thinking.
I suppose I should be grateful that, as the people of North Shropshire demonstrated in historically significant terms, the people are taking out their anger on the right target. The Tories lost what should have been one of the safest seats in the country. and pro-lockdown Labour also took a pretty massive kicking compared to the last election.
As the Sounding Board lads point out in their latest podcast, on this occasion, it’s possible that the Lib Dems picked up this seat not just because they were the default protest vote, but because they actually opposed vaccine passports and voted against the restrictions that Johnson’s govt pushed through this week only with Labour support.
The best, clearest summary of where we are, what the nature of the factions is and what it suggests for the future are in this brilliant talk from a guy on YouTube who calls himself Coach RedPill. It’s US-centric, but it absolutely applies here in the UK.
It is a long video, but the meat we are interested in is covered over about the first two hours. It’s very thoughtful, carefully constructed analysis. Well worth a listen.
AJ
Just mining the internet for a piece I’m trying to put together, when I found this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200311195850/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/
This is the front page of the Telegraph, from the evening of 11th March 2020.
[If you have problems reading paywalled content, use a different browser (e.g. Firefox) and install the NoScript extension]
To prevent catching or transmitting coronavirus in public, no. They are not recommended by the NHS, Public Health England (PHE), the World Health Organisation (WHO), or the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) because there is no solid evidence they work. Indeed, they may do unforeseen harm.
Masks cause people to touch their faces more, increasing – not decreasing – the chances of them picking up the virus. They do not fit tightly and allow airborne particles in. People also wear them for much longer than they are designed, causing them to become moist, unsanitary and an ideal environment for bugs.
Most importantly, there is a risk that masks distract people from what the evidence overwhelmingly suggests is the best way of protecting yourself and others – washing your hands frequently. But as previously mentioned, hand-washing is boring and face masks look the part.
In the UK, there are concerns that stocks of surgical masks will run low as a result of the panic buying. The British Dental Association, for one, is rationing orders. In the US, Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams didn’t mince his words when he issued the following Tweet: “Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing the general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if health care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
According to behavioural psychologist Jo Hemmings, “herd mentality, and a mixture of fear and greed.”
She told us: “When we see others do it, we feel we might be missing out if we don’t copy them. It is a way of taking some control in a situation we have little control over. Interestingly though, in spite of the panic buying of masks, you still see very few people actually wearing them out and about. At the moment they seem to be an insurance policy -people just feel safer just owning them.”
Medical Anthropologist Florence Walker suggests that many of us simply don’t believe the authorities who tell us masks are useless. “Hand-washing doesn’t have the same ‘magical’ talisman property that a face mask has,” she says. “In some ways it’s difficult to comprehend how masks couldn’t work.”
As to whether we’ll all be wearing them in the West at some point? “No. Not overnight, at least,” she says. “Face mask wearing has been a staple public health measure in Asia since the 1910 flu outbreak. It’s ingrained into their cultural psyche in a way it isn’t here.”
LOL
AJ
I don’t think I need to comment extensively at this moment, but I do think these people should be on a list. I’ll leave it to your imagination as to what fate should befall the people who make it onto this list. I expect the list will continue to grow.
The internet never forgets.
Comeuppance need not be in a hurry.
1) Andrew Neil
2) Karren Brady
What a selection of charmers.
AJ
You may have noticed that I’m very fond of highlighting the times I’ve been right in my analyses, proclamations and predictions. There have been a lot of them.
But reading through my blogposts since last March, there have clearly been a number of times when I’ve been wrong.
These fall into two basic categories:
On the first, for all of my rightful cynicism about politicians I have proclaimed my belief that two politicians would see common sense and liberty prevail. These were Dominic Raab, based on the book he published before he became an MP, and Priti Patel, based on her history of being a hard-boiled, plain-speaking taker of zero shit.
Of course this was naive and an archetypal triumph of hope over experience, which was revealed false as it became clear that – in service of their careers and the narrative – these two would jettison everything they had hitherto claimed on the record to believe in.
Both of these two have since uttered the same selection of vacuous nonsense and authoritarian monstrosities as every other front bench politician. Because nothing they previously believed in matters as much as their access to the levers of power.
‘Oh they need to retain their hold on the levers in order of effect the change that we need. They can’t do it from the backbenches, and if they seem to compromise their principles in order to do this, then so be it.’
Sorry, no. Fuck off. They have jettisoned their principles, and these are now languishing somewhere on the Atlantic ocean floor, never to be recovered.
I kick myself for not seeing this in the first place, but I was clearly naive enough in those early months of this horrific clusterfuck to hang onto some hope that good sense may soon prevail.
It’s not a mistake I shall make again.
My other class of mistake – expecting the general public to be totally over this nonsense by the middle of 2020 – was, similarly, hope over experience.
Even as I wrote about them I had underestimated the sheer number of people who had a vested interest in this ‘new normal’. The millions who surfed through 2020 with the government paying their wages. The vast number of people who are in any case routinely paid by the government. The preponderance of people who can ‘work from home’. The undeniable ease with which one can now get through most days without leaving the house. The unprecidented and overwhelming success of the government’s propaganda campaign and their buying of the media (via advertising revenue) who then fell into lockstep behind the propaganda campaign. The number of low-status people who would seize and jealously guard the newfound powers to don a flourescent tabbard and order people around – wear a mask, keep your distance, use the hand gel, get a jab, stay in your house.
Even as I wrote about my own view that 2019 was not some sunlit upland of freedom, low taxes, cohesive wholesome society, and that it wasn’t going to be something that a lot of people would truly want to go back to, I thought that there’d be a rapid regression to the mean.
I got it wrong because of hope.
‘The Great One’ is fond of saying ‘hope is not a process’ or ‘hope is not a plan’. He’s right, but as a means to hang on to one’s sanity in times of lunacy, it’s awfully tempting to cleave to it.
There’s one more big thing that I remember from early 2020, and it’s not something I particularly bought into, but it’s definitely something I hoped was correct. I hoped (in spite of my own scepticism) that those who said “well, now we have an actual crisis, people will stop crapping on about 73 genders and calling all the statues racist. Woke is dead” were correct.
That REALLY hasn’t turned out to be the case, has it? Certainly not in my world at least. The march of diversity and inclusion, feminism and victimhood olympics has been more pronounced and more fundamentally victorious in 2021 than in any previous year. The cancellations have accelerated. The green agenda is flying higher than Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and RIchard Branson. The legislative absurdities have ramped up. The propaganda has become more blatant and more soviet in its insistence that you loudly countermand the evidence of your own senses.
From the small coterie of sensible people, I hear an ongoing back and forth. “People are waking up. The dam will burst soon.” “Bah. People are not waking up. They are sleepwalking into armageddon. Things that were referred to a year ago as right-wing conspiracies are now being talked about as if they are the obvious, right and just truth.”
I’m in the latter camp now. People are not waking up. As they narrative changes they will change direction and pay no mind at all to yesterday’s direction. On the first day of the new mask mandate, there everyone was in the supermarket, dutifully sporting their magic face nappies, using the hand gel and keeping their distance. It was like we’d transported right back to April 2020 and forgotten everything that has gone since. The only difference was that they now don’t have a nobhead on the door shouting at anyone who didn’t toe the line. I expect that to change once they’ve gotten their shit together again. But still, I was one of only two people in the entire place (that I saw) the other day not wearing a mask. And this is not one of those rough places where some chimp member of the public would get in your face for not wearing the nappy. It’s a place where ignorance and superstition are embraced.
Even people who know somewhere in the back of their minds that things are not adding up (the unjabbed need to get the jab to protect the jabbed from the virus?) are hostages to the cognitive dissonance. They’ve worn their magic-face-nappies, even got a cute Cath Kidston one or a manly one from Oakley or some shit, got their jabs, queued for boosters, done endless LFT/PCR tests. They’ve condemned as stupid and selfish anyone who points out the obvious – fallability of the tests, the quickly waning efficacy of the jabs, the spectre of indefinite boosters, the scores of collapsing sports people, the media normalisation of fit young people having heart problems – and they have been rendered violently psychologically incapable of contemplating the possibility that they have been made a total mug out of – if not mortally endangered and pauperised – over the last 2 years.
Adam Piggott wrote the other day that the Omicron variant represents the get-out-of-jail free card for the politicians and for the public who are under their behavioural psychology spell.
I think there may be something in that hypothesis, but I think the ‘road to normal’ promises a sting in the tail for us refuseniks. The government and their media lackeys still have the narrative very much under their control.
If the Cathedral is going to make it out of this period in one piece, they have to be able to maintain the impression that they did the right things given the information that they had at the time and that it was all in everyone’s best interests. They will have to leave the lingering impression that things would have gotten back to normal much more quickly if it weren’t for those who refused to wear the mask, get the jabs, stay at home, keep their distance etc.
That way, the general public who have been swept along by this clusterfuck will maintain faith in the rotten institutions and sceptical people will never be able to conduct an inquest into the sheer evil that has gone on, because the pat response from an overwhelming majority of people (who still have a vested interest in believing that they were not useful idiots, conformists, cowards and latent fascists) will be “you should shut up, because if it weren’t for the likes of you, this would have all been over in 2021.”
We have to keep reminding them. The collapsing sportsmen, the millions of adverse reaction reports, the deaths in care homes as the NHS cleared its decks, the tiktok nurses, the graphs that showed a greater percentage of hospitalised people were vaxxed, that the numbers were cooked and manipulated to give a profoundly dishonest account, that places with no masks fared as well or better than places with masks, that dozens of studies were unable to show a statistically significant benefit from magic face nappies.
That government ministers and their comrades made millions of pounds from side-deals in 2020. That there is now a full record of the government’s use of behavioural psychology to terrify and manipulate the public into compliance. That the government bought the media’s compliance with advertising money (out of your pockets). That Neil Ferguson, Matt Hancock and Dominic Cummings were instrumental in imposing draconian restrictions on you and me, but showed no intention of being bound by them themselves. That there is now a perpetual NHS crisis as waiting times and missed diagnoses of cancer and heart conditions comes home to roost, likely to see an order of magnitude more deaths than even those tenuously linked to Covid since March 2020. That there are internment camps in Australia and mandatory jabs for all in Austria. That vaccine passports are rolling out around the world. That this is nothing less than apartheid and bigotry, the likes of which we would consider horrific if it only applied to black people or Muslims or women. That even discussing these things on social media will see you memory-holed – the entire western world’s permitted range of opinions is now being dictated by a bunch of blue-haired, dim-witted landwhales in California. That we are now in an inflationary hell as costs of living rise at a rate we have not seen for 40 years in the UK, as a result of supply chain disintegration, vast money printing and businesses attempting to make up for a lost year and an ongoing loss of productivity as everyone stays at home and as the business property market falls into distress and is all bought up by the Chinese who are used to sitting on idle assets for years at a time, waiting for the moment of action – their big advantage over governments who have to strategise over a much shorter time horizon due to democratic vagaries.
I don’t feel able to predict what will happen next, but if I did it wouldn’t involve sunlit uplands and it wouldn’t involve hoping for rational or just things to happen.
And that’s my end note. We all know who is responsible for the last 18+ months. Big tech, the legacy media, the politicians, the unions, the public sector employees, the go-along-to-get-along loser public, the atomised seizing on the social solidarity of totalitarianism. The one thing I feel confident in predicting is that – bar the odd lone scapegoat – none of these people will ever be hend accountable or face consequences.
But consequences are all we’re going to be facing for years to come. It’s not going away for years and years.
Happy Sunday, and if your God is with you this day, ask him just what the fuck he’s been playing at for the last 50 years, because the forces of evil have been making him (and you) look like a right dickhead for my entire lifetime.
AJ
1997. Remember that? A new dawn has broken has it not? That grinning gibbon Blair, underpinned by Brian Cox and his gurning-faggot band.
So how did that promise work out? Have things got better? Has ANYTHING AT ALL got better?
I’m prepared to concede that there was a trajectory of improvement for a few years, but that had already begun before these shitmonkeys got control of the country.
Technology certainly continued to improve, up to a point. But I’m fairly convinced that pretty much peaked in 2012 or so.
But what about the last 10 years or so? Is there anything that is objectively better now, than in 2012?
Let’s take a few random examples:
Is there a greater or lesser likelihood of your bank accounts being emptied by foreign electronic conmen while your bank shrug their shoulders and swear there’s nothing they can do?
Is a new iPhone in 2022 honestly game-changingly better than one from 2012? Or is it twice the price and obsolete in half the time?
Are cars better or are they just more heavily loaded with cheaply-made but expensive-to-replace parts and superficially shiny technology that has ‘planned obsolescence’ written all over it? Do cars send more or less of your data to the corporations and government than they did 10 years ago?
Are politicians more honest or displaying more integrity than 10 years ago? More or less corruption and lucrative deals given to chums? Are elections fairer and more honest? Is there more or less democratic accountability?
Is the media more unbiased or even-handed? Are they more or less likely to be ‘fearless seekers after truth’?
Are there more or fewer people in positions of authority whose entitlement or suitability to that position can be questioned freely?
What about fair and open access to justice? Improved much by the Tories’ judicial reforms?
Are you more or less likely to reach the heights of corporate & political power as a person who didn’t attend Oxford, Cambridge, the LSE or the right private schools?
Is the NHS better than it was 10 years ago? Is it easier to see a doctor or get an NHS dentist? Are waiting lists reduced at all? Have survival KPIs for cancer or heart disease improved?
Is it easier to get on the housing ladder or is it more expensive, more difficult and more precarious?
Is there more or less freedom of speech? Or freedom of conscience? Or bodily autonomy?
Are you more or less likely to be tracked and traced and have your electronic trail mined by corporations and governments for their own benefit?
Are you more or less likely to be caught in a kafkaesque hell any time you engage with a corporation, in an attempt to assert your rights as a customer?
Has music gotten better, or have we in fact seen manufactured lowest-common denominator autotuned crap completely crowd out anything with a modicum of originality or individuality?
How about film and television? More or less artistic freedom or originality? More or less naked propaganda for a particular narrative?
Are we able to talk yet about who committed terrorist atrocities, and demonstrate righteous anger at the pertetrators and those who fail to protect citizens? Do you think the measures our governments took in the wake of terrorist attacks have made your quality of life better or worse?
Is the culture more or less fair, open and healthy than it was 10 years ago? Do we actually have a dominant culture that is everything promised by Vox Day in his SJW trilogy?
Do you feel more or less free than 10 years ago to make common sense observations about the reality you experience, without losing your job, your social standing or even your liberty?
Is your high street a better, more vibrant place than it was 10 years ago?
How about supply chain resilience?
Energy security?
Is traffic better than it was? Is it easier to park?
Is public transport more efficient, frequent or affordable?
Are taxes any lower? Petrol any cheaper?
Is it easier to start a small business?
How’s your pension looking? And your retirement age?
And your salary compared to 10 or 20 years ago? If you earned £50K in 2000, or £65K in 2010, and earn £85K today, you have taken a real-terms pay cut. https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator
Are you more or less likely than 10 years ago to be told blatant, transparent and demonstrable lies coupled with demands that you accept the lies at face value or be branded a bigot, a conspiracy theorist, a nazi or a sexistracisthomophobe?
Are your children more or less likely to be force-fed a curriculum based on a far left progressive agenda?
Are your pre-pubescent children more or less likely to decide that they are not the gender that they were born with? How about the likelihood of ‘trusted professionals’ in education and medicine conspiring with them to make and execute life changing decisions without your consultation or consent? Less likely than 10 years ago?
Are your children likely to find a university education more affordable than you did? Is their university education going to be of higher quality than the one you had?
As a Christian are you more or less likely to find social acceptance of your devoutly-held beliefs which have been the foundations of this nation for hundreds of years?
So what, if anything has improved? Well, degeneracy, basically. Access to recreational drugs and pornography. Availability and social acceptability of body modification such as tattoos, piercings etc. Unaccountable no-strings sex. All the stuff that I thought was awesome when I was 21, but had learned the lessons of by the time I was 30.
I don’t begrudge anyone their youthful indulgence in the darker side of life, but you’re supposed to come out of the other side and see it for what it was… not make it your life’s mission to turn everyfuckingthing into that seedy, desparate, dirt-grubbing underworld depicted in Total Recall.
Honestly, I feel like a right old bastard now, but be honest, am I wide of the mark? Has ANYTHING good, beautiful or true seen an improvement in its standing over the last 10 years or so?
I’ll tell you the worst thing, though…. cunts from the alt-right condemning me for black-pilling, and stuffing their white pill or their god-pill in my face. Your God is all well and good, mate, but almost every single one of His earthly representatives has taken the devil’s coin.
Just what conclusions am I supposed to draw from that? It’s almost as if Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence are actually just the names of His furbabies.
AJ
This is possibly the best news I’ve heard in 2 solid years.
I for one welcome our new alien overlord. Yessssss.. kill it all, my pretty.
AJ
And not a pucker-faced beeboid in sight.
Some things that meet the brief:
There’s an exciting cadre of post-libertarians lighting the way over the the USA. This is a great channel, and I found this particular guest most refreshing – even if she is a girl.
Next: Ever heard of Wolfram Alpha? Yeah – this guy. And he is fascinating. Lex Fridman has some great guests and always delivers a genuinely satisfying interview. I’ve only managed the first hour of this so far as it’s pretty dense, but I’ll be back to finish it very soon.
Did you hear the one about the two guys who showed up at the Netflix Dave Chapelle protest bearing signs that said “Jokes are funny. We like jokes” and “Dave is funny. We like Dave”? The transfascists were not a happy bunch. If you only ever take in one episode of The Dick Show, it should be this one.
I’m not an unalloyed fan of Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon of Akkad) but Michael Malice and he had a very entertaining chat.
Another really interesting ‘post-libertarian’ is Adam Patrick. Here he is with Justin Campbell, whose latest podcast episode I also found very interesting.
And finally… if you had told me 2 years ago that one day I would be an avid consumer of Russell Brand’s output, I’d probably have sought legal advice. But here we are, in upside-down world. And here is Russell Brand, giving the people what they want. With added chest pubes.
That’ll do for now. Enjoy.
AJ
Not quite as open-and-shut a case as it was yesterday with Beardy, but solid nevertheless.
[Pastebin]
I think the sceptics have to accept some responsibility for their failings. Common sense dictates that if you confine most people to their homes then infections will start to fall, so if we’re going to persuade people that lockdowns don’t work we need a compelling theory as to why that hypothesis is false. We never came up with one. We also got a lot of things wrong at the beginning, such as saying there wouldn’t be a second wave and, when the second wave was upon us, claiming it was a ‘casedemic’ not an epidemic. I don’t think we got more things wrong than the enthusiasts —take their prediction that daily infections would rise to 100,000 after ‘freedom day’, for instance — but given that we were arguing against the prevailing wisdom we couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. In retrospect, I wish I’d been more cautious.
More cautious, Toby? Really? Have you even listened to any of your podcasts with Delingpole? Do you remember re-jigging the forums and comments on your website so as to exclude those given to stridency and invective? You know, like the MSM does, and like an establishment lefty would?
The reason lockdown sceptics failed is really simple. It was, from the get go, a coalition of the damned.
Oh sure, we had the hard-headed rational empiricists – amongst whom I count myself.
But then we had the nutters. Oodles of them. 5G, nanobots, graphene-oxide, magnets, Joe Mercola, David Icke, homeopathy and horoscopes were their primary pre-occupations.
Naturally, I called this very early on, but I have to admit that, against my better judgement, having been unable to persuade the sceptic community of this principle I backed down on my insistence that the resistance not be polluted by the preponderance of magical thinkers. They were the dogshit in the yoghurt. The argument was that we needed numbers in order to gain momentum and we were in no position to be choosy. In retrospect it was a huge mistake to aquiesce to this self-interested assertion.
The fact of the matter is that every intelligent person of my acquaintance whom I attempted to persuade that lockdowns, masks, furlough, tests, vaccines and mandates were all scientifically unsound simply dismissed my points on the basis that these things were conspiracies. This in-spite of the fact that I was using official primary sources for all of my supporting data and information: governments of the UK, USA, EU, the WHO, the UN, esteemed professors from top-tier universities.
None of it mattered because I was seen as adjacent to people who plainly were – and still are – conspiracy nutters. These people may as well think I have a room in my house with a wall full of map pins, string and newspaper cuttings. It’s because of this that primary facts could not even get a hearing.
Sadly, I suspect this is unavoidable, and I’m left to ponder how things could have been different, but I expect that in a random sample, the CNs outnumber the rational empiricists by a factor of 5 or 10.
I have to admit it’s not a lot of fun being in a rational minority of a dissident minority, but I expect history would be littered with similar examples if the dissident minority had ever got the opportunity to write the history. That doesn’t happen very often at all.
AJ
I know.. beardy fish in a lefty barrel.
Brendan O’Neill has two modes of operating:
Today, it’s the latter.
His argument amounts to this: Yes, I know Alec Baldwin is an awful human being who has spent the last 5 years regarding anyone to the right of Bernie as vermin. But if you take any pleasure at all in him having been involved in a tragic accident, you’re no better than him, are you?
But how much of an accident was it?
Whether Brendan hasn’t done his research or whether this is, again, him on the moral high ground, he fails to note that there are reports of several accidental discharges in the previous days on set, and that because qualified people had walked away from the shitshow, the crew were depending on people who were not fit to be doing the job of handing lethal weapons to people whose job is to dress up and pretend.
O’Neill baldly pre-empts police enquiries by stating as a fact that “Baldwin was not at fault”.
Oh sure, it was a cock-up. No-one is suggesting Baldwin knew the gun was loaded and that he wilfully shot someone, but was he an innocent actor who simply trusted his crew? Or was he an arrogant ignoramus who, having spent half a lifetime despising gun enthusiasts, revelead his fatal ignorance by failing to carry out the most fundamental safety duties of any person who is handed a firearm?
Evidently, it’s the latter isn’t it? I don’t know much about guns, but I do know that if someone hands you one, whatever they told you, you check it. Trust but verify. Is it loaded? What with? Primed? Safety on?
But because he’s a know-nothing gobshite, he didn’t do this, did he?
The prima facie facts are pretty damning.
And so, bumptious Brendan asserts that anyone who finds schadenfreude in Baldwin’s predicament is ‘no better than him’. Really? Someone who has a dark sense of cosmic karma is no better than a historically ignoble gobshite who failed basic safety and consequently accidentally killed a person? Okay, Brendan. Whatever you say, mate.
The problem is this: The left made EVERYTHING about politics, and politics is a dirty mud-wrestling business.
Every successful political operator in history has won from the gutter. You may not like that fact, but your moral qualms do nothing to disprove it. You think Cameron or Blair or Obama or even Churchill won from the moral high ground? I beg to differ.
It’s too much of a stretch to think that Brendan O’Neill has reached his age and remained naive, so he can only be a self-righteous twonk. And we all have our moments, don’t we? But this man is the undisputed heavyweight champion.
AJ
Lots of really useful commentary on this from Louis Rossman, too.
We have been living in an artifically-created period of stability since the 2008 banking bailout. Someone was always going to be left without a seat when the music stopped.
The only thing that has changed is that there are now half as many seats, due to social distancing.
AJ
The whatnow?
I’ve been using Norton 360 for ages, because its built on decent foundations. Part of the suite is a browser plug-in that checks each link you visit to make sure it’s legit. Its purpose is ostensibly to prevent you from visiting a fraudulent banking site, or a site that would download malware or whatever nefarious shit.
It’s been fine for years, but I noticed recently that I was getting the big red warning page when I visited blogs and self-published sites that give information that is in conflict with the approved narrative.
The example that sticks most prominently in my mind is Samizdatmagazine.co.uk which is a phenomenally good new periodical being put together by Ronan Maher who is an aspiring journo in the Delingpole mould, but with sounder instincts. In fact he’s been interviewed by Delingpole here and it’s a very good listen.
Anyway, this site is being censored by Norton as a ‘dangerous website’.
I’ve got a professional handle on IT security and in my estimation the only thing dangerous about the Samizdat website is that it’s an early prototype and is very clunky as a consequence. I expect that situation to improve.
The first 3 issues of the Samizdat periodical are available for free at the above link if you can find your way through the mess, but I can’t see them continuing to be free because they’re just so good. A dense, curated collection of thinkpieces of the kind you might have expected in the Spectator a decade ago before it decided to write for screechy women who couldn’t find their HRT patches.
I started to notice this Norton censorship hobgoblin from time to time as I clicked onto sites with opinions about covid, vaccines etc. It started about a month ago. It’s not being talked about on the Internet. At least not as far as google or duckduckgo are concerned.
A Voice for Men are complaining about it, but that is literally it.
So I cancelled my subscription, which was up for renewal. No £80 for you, fuck-face.
My feedback form explained my decision:
I’m not paying you money to hand over my browsing decisions to a blue-haired lesbian landwhale in California.
You can check if your website (or one you like) is blacklisted by Norton at https://safeweb.norton.com/
Fuck Norton. I’ve scratched them (i.e. Symantec) off the list for our new AV solution at the office too. 4,000 endpoints, 400 servers. Not playing.
AJ
Obviously, the death of MP David Amess has dominated the conversation over the last 24 hours.
Opinion is split in the anti-lockdown/mask/vaxx/mandate enclaves.
On the one side is those who think that all MPs have, en masse, sold us down the river to forces of darkness. The very best of MP is just the sandwich with the least amount of dogshit in it. There’s no sobbing for Amess in this camp, though many have hesitated to express any gladness, which I think is fair enough.
On the other side we have people who have been moaning for 18 months about how evil the measures being taken are, how they cannot see their relatives and friends, cannot run their businesses, cannot receive the healthcare they paid for and cannot bury their dead with dignity, but object to any expression of cosmic justice at the death of one of those who voted for the evil that has upended every right we ever took for granted in England. The thing is evil, the people who voted for the evil thing are what?
And Amess did vote for the evil. Every single time he had the opportunity to vote in Parliament on what the government is doing vis. Covid, he voted with the government. There were scores of Tory MPs who sometimes or always voted against the totalitarian measures being taken by the government with respect to Covid. Amess was never one of them.
Amess is on record making the sort of noises that should assuage sceptics and anyone with misgivings about the extreme, technocratic and opportunist response to Covid that the UK government has pursued.
But, as the saying goes, fine words butter no parsnips. And it does seem like Amess was a man of very fine words – he had some that would please whosoever he happened to encounter, be they an immigrant on a raft or a Brexit diehard. So we shouldn’t be surprised that, in the end, they didn’t add up to a coherent position or a clarity of purpose, because they never came from a place of pure principle, but from the politics of a people-pleaser and party loyalist.
Amess had one simple set of tools at his disposal that we do not have. He could have voted against what has been done to us all over the last 20 months. Of course he could not have single-handledly stopped any of it, but if he had voted against the covid measures I could at least find it in my heart to lament the man.
And yes, if we look at his politics and voting record pre-2020, there are some encouraging things to be seen. Christian, Pro-life, pro-family, anti-EU. But it was a very mixed bag – he was also pro-immigration and pro-war. The top line message is that over his career, 98% of the time he voted with his party (who have been awful on almost everything since the 90s to this very day).
Yes he probably was one of the best of a bad bunch before Covid came along, and on the defining issue of our lifetimes, like a consummate politician he’s mollified angry constituents with all the right words, but his actions must speak far louder.
Covid is the only game in town now. The plain and open public records of the UK Parliament show that Amess was not, when the chips were down, on the side of the good and true.
AJ
Do you remember where you were when Jo Cox MP died?
I do. I was on an extended holiday in southern Europe taking in sights, sounds, tastes and textures that, 5 years on, are now out of my reach, and will probably remain so for a very long time to come.
Nevertheless, I got out my laptop, put it on the table I was occupying outside a seafront Café near Nice. I typed out and published a tribute to Jo Cox that, reading it now, makes me feel sick and ashamed.
So civilised were those times that a cold-hearted fucker like me felt the need to write a eulogy to the lost life of someone who was squarely my political enemy but a human being, a wife and a mother nevertheless.
But times are different now. We are at war. In March 2020, the entire political establishment decared war on us the people. They used every tool at their disposal. Lawfare, psychology, propaganda, militarised police. They sought to divide us and set us plebs at one another’s throats, to distract from the fact that 650 MPs had voted to confine us to our homes and take away our work, our families, our access to healthcare and our sanity.
This afternoon, an MP was stabbed to death at a surgery held in his constituency.
And I don’t care. 1 down, 649 to go.
This fucker, David Amess, voted with the government and against us, the public, on every single coronavirus vote.
In more benign times, we might have said ‘he was one of the good ones’ because he was no leftie and he was no remainer. But these are not those benign times. When the real test came, he sided with his chums in the Oxbridge pole-smokers club and against those of us who value freedom, personal autonomy, bodily integrity, truth, rational discourse and natural rights.
When the heat was on, David Amess turned out to be someone who, when attacked and killed, made me think just one thing: “Good. Fuck him.”
It’s a neat bit of cosmic justice.
AJ
UPDATE: Speaking of cosmic justice, it appears that the man who liked to virtue signal about immigrants was stabbed to death by a Somalian.
This is golden.
The cover refers to an article, titled ‘Periods on Display’ and published on September 1, which reviews an exhibition on the history of menstruation at the Vagina Museum in London. In the piece, the writer says “women” four times, but also uses the phrase “bodies with vaginas” once.
It is a quote including this latter term that the Lancet’s editors chose to use on the front page. “Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected,” it says.
‘Absolutely inexcusable language to refer to women and girls’
While the language is an attempt at inclusivity it has prompted a furious response, with some academics suggesting they will never work with the journal again.
An exhibition on the history of menstruation at the Vagina Museum in London.
Where does one even begin with that??
Well, one place to begin is with a statistic oft cited by The Great One.
Go on, remind me why they should be allowed to vote.
AJ
We called this right at the start and were either ignored or derided by biddable thickos and evil twats for caring about things other than a fucking cold engineered by a bunch of slitty-eyed, IP-theiving, bat-munching commies.
Yep… called this too. Just read it. People with cancer having treatments rationed. By a service that they have paid for all their lives under threat of imprisonment.
Envy of the world. Go on. Say it with me. ENVY. OF. THE. WORLD. If you say it enough times, it’ll definitely be true.
Fuck everyone who shared TikToking nurses, clapped for the NHS, painted every fucking surface with hybrid NHS/faggot flags, or poured money into the bottomless pit via Captain Tom.
Fuck the NHS. Fuck everyone who bought into this two-year totalitarian titwank.
I’m about ready to walk up the street with a nine iron, swinging at maskoids.
AJ
Al Jahom's Final Word 