Be Surprised. And Be Outraged

Some footage that has been doing the rounds on social media shows a young pregnant mother called Zoe Lee Buhler at home in her pyjamas being arrested, handcuffed, and carted off by a gaggle of policemen in front of her young children.

Her offence? She put up a post on Facebook informing people about a peaceful protest in Ballarat about the Draconian Covid restrictions currently being imposed in Victoria.[1]

Victoria is currently under the premiership of a gentleman called Daniel Andrews, who looks rather as though he is an idiot.  But looks can be deceptive. He is a manipulative, hard left thug.

Some have commented that Zoe Lee should not have been either surprised or outraged at her incarceration. It seems to me that we should be both surprised and outraged at this brutish attempt by the authorities in Victoria to suppress any criticism of their policies. In Russia, or China, or Zimbabwe, or Belarus, we might not be so surprised, but we should still be outraged.

Views vary about the wisdom of Covid lockdowns. Personally, I rather agree with Lord Sumption and many others who are expert in the field that lockdowns are absurd. I further agree with him that there is no moral obligation to comply with absurd Covid regulation, and that the imposition of these regulations is an abuse of governmental power.

But more to the point here, I also agree with him about the grave dangers that arise when people sheepishly do what they are told by governments without question. Lord Sumption says:

“I would accept that the majority probably favour the lockdown but that is, I’m afraid, how despotisms arise. Despotisms arise not because our liberty is forcibly taken away by tyrants but because people voluntarily surrender their liberty in return for protection from some perceived threat and it’s in the interests of governments to exaggerate that threat in order to procure compliance.”

I was born in England at a time when, only a few years before, our liberty had been gravely threatened by a German despot. The threats imposed by real despotic power are very real, and yet they have not been felt now for some decades in the Western world. Instead, many of the younger generation worry about issues that are, by comparison, mere froth.

It is worth bearing in mind Richard Dawkins’ analysis, in his books, about the evolution of genes and their intellectual cousins, memes.[2] There is no divine hand or human conspiracy at play.

It is the same, it seems to me, with governmental power. Governments feed off power. Their rival is individual freedom. The more they can suppress individual freedom, the more ascendancy they obtain in this ancient battle. And so Covid is a wonderful opportunity for governmental power. Not only does it enable the government to control where people may go, what they may do and even what they may say, but it also tightens the government’s grip on the reins of the economy. Never mind that that grip strangles the economy. Memes do not gain their ascendancy by worrying about that sort of stuff. There is no conspiracy. There is no grand design.

It is not all a one-way street, of course. Once a society becomes entirely despotic, and its economy ruined, the regime falls, either by political collapse or war. There are many examples. The communist USSR. Nazi Germany. Umpteen examples from the ancient and mediaeval worlds. Sometimes the collapse is slow and partial. Like Venezuela. And Zimbabwe. And Albania. And Cuba.  Either way, eventually and after immense pain and many dead, people re-emerge with due respect for the basic principles of freedom of speech and democracy.

What worries me is that so many young people have so little understanding of this process. Their willingness to see people carted off by the police, or handed out massive fines[3], for speaking out against the government should be deeply troubling. Equally troubling is the modern movement to silence and remove from post anyone who fails to agree with current woke shibboleths. And if these things are not deeply troubling to society at large, then I fear that we are headed for despotic collapse.

Hopefully I will be well dead by then.  But I worry for my children, and other people’s children, and of course for all those whose lives and livelihoods are now being and will be shattered by this madness.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1301603595842998272

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[1] Ballarat is not a place where there is any Covid, or at any rate any evidence of it (there may be lots of people with Covid there who are entirely asymptomatic, as elsewhere in the world). The explanation for her arrest is not that she was representing any threat to public health, but that she represented a threat to the Victorian government’s dictat.

[2] The ability of successful genes and memes to propagate themselves might seem clever, but in fact is merely the result of iteration. The living world is, in  large measure, just a huge Barnsley set.

[3] As in Piers Corbyn’s case, who was recently fined £10,000 for participating in a demonstration against despotic covid regulation.

Black Lives Get Richer

Social media has suggested, in the past few days, the donations to the Black Lives Matter Global Network end up going to the Democratic party in the United States. You might or might not think that this is a good thing. Personally, I think the Democratic party and the Republican party are about equally flawed: the Democratic party is riddled with crooks and the Republican party is riddled with bores. Take your choice.

Certainly, the three owners of the Black Lives Matter Global Network  – Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi  – are unlikely to support the Republican party. Be that as it may, it seems overwhelmingly probable that they do not in fact give the donations to the Democratic party.

Depending on your point of view, the truth seems to be either better or worse. In large measure (well, 71%), it seems that they simply keep it, for themselves or for their “consultants”:

Indo-China

The current border tensions between India and China are extraordinary.

It seems that both sides have agreed not to use their guns, but instead, the Chinese army has attacked the Indians with bars, wooden clubs studded with nails etc. They have apparently killed 20 Indian soldiers yesterday, including  a colonel. These casualties have been largely caused, it seems, by the Chinese soldiers manhandling Indian soldiers into steep ravines such that the Indian soldiers fell to their deaths.  The Indians say that there were casualties on both sides, but the Chinese have not said how many of their people were killed.

One’s heart goes out, of course, to the families of the soldiers. Most (some would say all) deaths caused in this sort of conflict should be unnecessary.

But it is worth noting that

Barbarous History

The Black Lives Matter movement does cause us to take another look at the issue of slavery, and one thing that is all too apparent is that the popular picture of white Europeans enslaving black Africans is massively distorted. Less than 10% of the slavery we know about falls in that category. As regards modern slavery, Wikipedia notes:

The number of people currently enslaved around the world is far greater than the number of slaves during the historical Atlantic slave trade.[1]

All slavery is detestable, and it is much to the credit of the British government that the British largely led the abolition of slavery around the world. Slavery has been more or less unknown in England for over a thousand years, and was formally declared illegal in England in the 18^th century and throughout the British Empire early in the 19^th century. Other countries – United States and Brazil for example – retained slavery for decades after that.

What is frequently overlooked these days is that one of the most prevalent slave trades in relatively recent times was the slave trade perpetrated by Africans, who enslaved not only other Africans, but also large numbers of Europeans. These slavers known variously as the Barbary Pirates or the Corsairs, carried out

raids on European coastal towns and villages, mainly in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal, but also in the British Isles,^[1] the Netherlands, and Iceland.^[2]

The numbers were not small. Again, according to Wikipedia:

Between 1580 and 1680 corsairs were said to have captured about 850,000 people as slaves and from 1530 to 1780 as many as 1,250,000 people were enslaved.^[1]

It didn’t stop there; they continued capturing white slaves, typically

VPOTUS?

Joe Biden says he wants to choose a female black running mate in his presidential bid.

Diane Abbott is not too busy these days. I wonder if perhaps the UK could spare her?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/diane-abbott-lbc-interview-video-jeremy-corbyn-ira-meetings-platform-car-crash-iain-dale-a7759241.html

Just a

Woken up

 

It is been a hell of a week. But at least I have woken up to some things I didn’t know before, thanks to some brave campaigners.

Thanks to these guys, protesting at Downing Street in London, I’ve woken up to the realisation that it was Boris Johnson who got a sadistic American policeman to kneel on the neck of an Afro-American suspect long enough to kill him. Until now, I had naïvely thought it was really nothing to do with the UK government at all.

The Fight against Censorship

Toby Young’s contribution to the the lockdown debate has been censored by YouTube. They say it offends their “guidelines”.

So here it is on another platform: https://www.bitchute.com/video/P7qJBIVOPoBs/. Judge for yourselves.

As it happens, I agree with Toby Young, and indeed Lord Sumption (a great lawyer, who makes Baroness Hale look like an annoying feminist student), on this issue. But more to the point, legitimate commentary should not be consored. Not by YouTube. Not by Twitter. Not by the BBC or the ABC. Not by the State. Oh no. We are not

The White Cat

 

“All happy families are alike. But each unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way”.

So wrote Leo Tolstoy. But in Russian, obviously.

Similarly, all who hope that Dominic Cummins will ride out the current storm are alike in thinking that he is that rare example of someone pulling the levers of power who is clever, imaginative and determined, and who is not trying to turn the United Kingdom into a sludge of pallid subservience. And, it turns out, someone who is prepared to do something brave and useful to protect his wife and child.

In contrast, what an awe-inspiring and colourful array of spite and vindictiveness we see from those trying to pull him down! Here are a few attitudes:

Greta Thunberg; Climate change activist

The cost of his trip to Durham is that people are DYING! Whole communities are being WIPED OUT! All he can do is to give EXPLANATIONS! In WORDS! How dare he? How DARE he?

Lord Adonis; Remainer

He had it coming. We told people how to vote in the EU referendum, and he conspired to encourage people to think for themselves. The little shit!

Baroness Hale, Judge

Off with his head. (Blah blah blah). For the foregoing reasons, we find that the defendant, in looking after his wife and child, had failed to observe the human rights of other members of the European Community, who have a legitimate interest in the United Kingdom placing itself in a comparative economic disadvantage. Accordingly, he and everything he has done is a nullity.

Steve Baker, Conservative MP

Two-Tone Steps to Fascism?

Early in the last century, there was a regrettable passion for two-tone shoes. Rightly derided by the discerning, they nevertheless insinuated themselves into 20^thcentury culture.

And what was the result? I will tell you what the result was. It was totalitarianism, and the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany. Which was a bad thing. You might remark that another result was the rise of communism, but if you will forgive the exercise of the vulgar expression, these are but different ends of the same turd.

And now it’s back. We see it in shirts, where there is a fashion for the insides of collars and cuffs to be made from a fabric different from the main body of the shirt. And in two-tone socks. And in those suits where the buttonholes are made with red fabric, like miniature swastikas. So should we expect the same results over again?

There are signs of it. Millions of people have become willing, like sheep, to submit to the will of governments and NGOs who increasingly want to dictate what we may think, what we may say, and where we may go (if anywhere). Do not tell me, if you please, that

Something Rotten in the State of Primark

 

Something really strange is going on in UK politics.

It was only a wet weekend ago that that nice Jeremy Hunt persuaded us all (well, most of us) that something ought to be done to rein in, even if only a little bit, the stupendous waste within the National Health Service, the cost of which was spiralling out of control. I’m not suggesting that he was universally loved, particularly by the Jo Brand (“Chuck battery acid in their faces”) School of Socialist Nursing. But, by the end of the run-off in the election for the Conservative party leadership last year, he looked, compared with Boris the Bear, the more cuddly option. Very Jeremy.

But now look what has happened. Just a few months on, there is a nasty flu-like illness going around which has been bumping off some coffin dodgers. What is our new no-nonsense government doing about it?

The first thing it is done has lain down at the feet of Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, whose track record for getting things wrong in the field of epidemiology is rivalled only by Tim Flannery’s track record for getting everything wrong in the field of climate change. On the basis of some dodgy code which Professor Ferguson has not been prepared to release (“Well, yeah, I wrote it a while ago, and it’s not really documented, and there are some rather furry bits around the edges”) the country has been reduced to a “lockdown” in a way that neither Napoleon, nor Hitler, nor Strictly Come Dancing has been able to manage.

Nobody, I think, seriously suggests that ruining the country’s economy in this way is likely to reduce the death toll from Covid-19; at best, they are looking at “flattening the curve” (aka