Current political discourse has a peculiar pre-occupation with controlling the future. Hence, on the one hand we increasingly seem to be governed by deadlines: 2030 for the UN Sustainable Development goals; 2035 for the ending of sales of new petrol and diesel cars; 2040 for the making of cycling and walking “the natural choices for shorter journeys“; 2050 for Net Zero; and so on and so forth. And on the other hand, predicting, forecasting and modelling the future has become an obsession of government everywhere in the world, made most obvious during the Covid era (when “we must do X because, if we extrapolate from where we are now, Y will result if we do nothing” became the governing structure of our entire lives), but evident across the piece, with climate change being the most notable example.
Clearly, whenever anybody plans anything, or indeed takes any action at all, they have in mind that the results will manifest themselves, definitionally, in events that are yet to pass. But I aim to show here that there is something deeper at work in contemporary government’s fixation on the future, understood not merely as a bunch of stuff that will happen, but as a something that is itself to be governed – measured, analysed and acted upon so as to be improved. The obsession says something vitally important about the nature of governing authority in our age. And also, as I will show towards the end of this piece, it helps us to criticise that authority and imagine that other possibilities may emerge.
“A better, more sustainable, peaceful future for our people and planet”
Let us begin, then, with a matter that is particularly apropos.
It would, of course, be to engage in tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorising to suggest that representatives of the world’s governments would ever all get together at a gigantic shindig in New York in order to discuss how they are going to transform global governance. But it just so happens that, as I am writing this post, representatives of the world’s governments are, well, all getting together at a gigantic shindig in New York in order to discuss how they are going to transform global governance.
The event is called the Summit of the Future, and it promises to “forge a new international consensus on how we deliver a better present and safeguard the future”. One result, amongst other things, has been the adoption of a Pact for the Future, which sets out how “the Heads of State and Government, representing the peoples of the world” will “protect the needs and interests of present and future generations” at “a time of profound global transformation”. And annexed to this is nothing less than a Declaration on Future Generations, which commits to ensuring that said future generations “thrive in prosperity and achieve sustainable development”.
This all stems from a wheeze dreamed up in 2021 by the current UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, called Our Common Agenda – essentially a plea for the continuing relevance of the United Nations in the mid-21st century. The idea here is that, by billing COVID-19 and the ‘climate crisis’ as a watershed moment or ‘inflection point’ in history akin to the Second World War, it will be possible to reinvigorate the organisation – and, in particular, revamp the way its constituent bodies are financed (that issue, funnily enough, arises again and again and again) – by presenting humanity as facing a choice between “further breakdown and a future of perpetual crises” or a “breakthrough to a better, more sustainable, peaceful future for our people and planet”. The message, then, is pretty transparent: since, without the UN, a “future of perpetual crisis” beckons, wouldn’t it be a jolly good idea for the UN to continue to exist, and ideally be more lavishly funded?
The Summit of the Future was always intended to be the capstone for Our Common Agenda, and would ideally produce an ‘outcome’ of some kind that could be pointed to in order to evidence its success. Sure enough, it seems like some sort of a consensus has emerged, one of the results of which being the aforementioned Pact for the Future; from what one can gather, there were a few holdouts (Belarus, Russia, Syria, Iran, North Korea and so on), but in the end more or less all UN members are nominally signed up.
As one would expect given the title of the event, the central theme of the Summit of the Future, and the Pact, has been – you’ve guessed it – the future. And here I must give you fair warning; you’d better get used to the word ‘future’, because you are now going to have to read it a lot. On the first two pages of the final text of the Pact for the Future alone I counted “future” appearing on 17 separate occasions; a quick CTRL-F search reveals it appears 88 times in the document in total (although some of these will just be headings and subheadings). The future, in other words, gets mentioned a very great deal, and the word begins to lose all meaning in the face of such repeated use.
Thus, we are told, Heads of State and Government are coming together in New York “to protect the needs and interests of present and future generations”; the multilateral system and the UN, we hear, “must be fit for the present and future”; the Pact itself, we learn, will help “deliver a better future for people and planet”; the 75th anniversary of the UN is described to us as an opportunity for reinvigoration so as to “ensure the future we want” based around “the well-being of current and future generations”; the drafters proclaim their confidence that they will soon be on track towards a “better and more sustainable future”; we are warned that, if we don’t pull our socks up and eat our greens, we will lurch into the aforementioned “future of persistent crisis and breakdown”; and so on.
And the substance of the Pact is relentlessly future-oriented. Everywhere we encounter things being “transformed” and “renewed”; at every turn we are told to welcome the prospect of “progress”; we are bombarded with talk about “paths” and “steps” and “road maps”, about “building” and “striving”, about “acceleration” and “keeping pace”; we are continually reminded that “nobody will be left behind”. The image that is painted is one of continuous and endless advancement towards an idealised set of objectives: nothing may stand still, and the past is an irrelevance – the only thing that matters, the Pact seems to suggest, is where we are going and how we will get there.
As I earlier mentioned, it is one thing to declare intentions, which will ineluctably concern the future; it is quite another to treat “the future” itself as a site of government, to be manipulated, disciplined, re-made or re-shaped. And it is the latter, rhetorically, that is indeed what the Pact of the Future and its Annexes seem to be doing. These documents do not merely set out a policy agenda. They reify “the future” almost as another reality or world – one into which we are about to step, and which we will be able, with the right amount of knowledge, foresight, skill and predictive capabilities, to mould in advance, as though we are all architects planning the refurbishments of the dream home which we will shortly inhabit.
Hence, the Pact’s agenda describes something akin to a heavenly end-state, in which poverty is “eradicated”, hunger “ended”, gender equality “achieved”, a “just and lasting peace” built, “freedom from terrorism” realised, and so on. Where a problem cannot be simply made to go away, the image that is presented instead is one of careful and continuous management: a Tocquevillian “vast and tutelary power” which “defuse[s] tensions, seek[s] the pacific settlement of disputes and resolve[s] conflicts”; “restore[s], protect[s], conserve[s] and sustainably use[s] the environment”; “seize[s] the opportunities associated with new and emerging technologies and address[es] the potential risks posed by their misuse”; and so on. A future is thereby constructed in which everything is known in advance and accounted for, and every foreseeable problem provided with a remedy before it happens; it is, as it were, nothing other than the end of contingency as such, forever and ever, amen.
The Summit of the Future and the contents of its outcome document, then, dovetail nicely with developments in modern governance in the round – both in the domestic and international spheres. We see in them emerging something akin indeed to a doctrine, or theory, of the future as something that has a concrete existence that we can know, and carefully shape, if only we have the sufficient knowledge and expertise. This transforms the future from a great unknown into something more akin to a blueprint or schema, waiting to be unfolded and, thereafter, realised.
Founding, conserving and expanding dominion
What explains this almost neurotic focus on a reified future? And why does it matter? The answer to both of these questions is complicated, but important, and I ask you to bear with me while I sketch it out.
In earlier posts (such as this one), I have described modernity as having brought with it the understanding, thanks to the Scientific Revolution, Renaissance and Enlightenment, that the world was not just a staging post on the way to rapture, but something possessing its own independent existence, and therefore with the potential to be acted upon. This meant it became possible to imagine that mankind could indeed improve the world (and its own moral awareness). But at the same time, due to precisely the same series of intellectual developments, the position of the ruler itself became problematised. While the medievals may have been content to understand the ruler’s status as natural or pre-ordained, to the modern mind the ruler was, to use Michel Foucault’s word, in a position that was ‘synthetic’ – not natural or pre-ordained, but indeed unnatural and contingent: something to be analysed, questioned, challenged and even over-thrown.
It followed, due to the confluence of these developments, that the modern state emerged as an answer to the question of why it is that government should exist and endure across time – it was a set of governing practices that governed the world precisely so as to justify its own status. Being “fragile and morally questionable“, temporal power was driven to govern on the basis that it was necessary for it to do so, in order that it should be able to continue to exist. Thus we find emerging the concept of raison d’Etat: government as rationalisation for what Giovanni Botero (1544-1617) referred to as the “founding, conservation, and expansion of dominion”.
And, as I have elsewhere explained, in our current age, it makes sense to cast the emerging sphere of global governance in roughly the same terms. As the institutions of global government are themselves “fragile and morally questionable” for the same reasons as the state institutions are in modernity, and as the “founding, conservation and expansion of dominion” will therefore in parallel be their obsession, it becomes easy to agree with Foucault’s description of the state as merely an “episode” in government – and to identify global government’s likely preoccupation to be the same as that of the modern state, i.e., rationalising its own existence. This – following Phillip Cerny – is what I tend to call raison du monde, the globalised equivalent of raison d’Ètat, understood as that form of reason which justifies the practice of global governance.
From all of this, we glean a description of modern government itself – whether in the domestic or international plane – as being carried out in conditions of contingency, and without firm foundation. And we thereby gain an understanding of governing in the modern sense as being driven by the needs of contingency: government in whatever guise is performed in the interests of dominion as such, because modern dominion is always, as it were, ‘synthetic’ and lacking in natural or theological justification, and therefore driven to simply govern in order to survive.
The authority of the ‘intelligent’ over the ‘unthinking’
This is all well and good, but perceptive readers will perhaps have realised that this is all really to foreground the problem of authority. The medieval sovereign possessed authority because his position was fixed, and reflected the position of God in the universe and the father in the family. It was pre-ordained (which is not to say, of course, that it did not come with its duties and obligations). The modern state, being ‘synthetic’, does not, and cannot, possess authority in these terms. And nor, by extension, of course, can global government. Therefore we must consider the problem of authority as being at the heart of modern anxieties concerning raison d’Ètat, and indeed raison du monde.
Holed up in Vichy Marseille in 1942, the Russian émigré philosopher Alexandre Kojève wrote an odd but illuminating paper concerning these matters, available nowadays in English in book form with the title The Notion of Authority. It was never published in his lifetime and he certainly did not intend for it to become public; it was apparently circulated quietly to figures in the French Government of the day. It is therefore a highly discursive and schematic text, and it is at times difficult to figure out what sources the author is referring to. But in it we find an exceptionally important section which sheds light in particular on the future as an aspect of political reason as I have here described it.
Kojève, having set himself the task of “knowing what authority is as such”, begins by categorising historical theories of authority into four types. The first puts ultimate authority in God, from whom all other forms of authority derive; this is the position of the medieval scholastics, to which I have already alluded. The second bases authority on what is just, or right; this, Kojève associates with Plato. The fourth theory situates authority in the relationship between master and slave – he who has authority being the one who is ready to risk his life to be recognised, while he who is a slave being the one who has chosen submission over death; this theory of authority is that of Hegel.
It is the third theory of authority, though, which is of particular importance for our purposes, and that, Kojève tells us, is the theory of Aristotle. Here, the justification for authority is based on “wisdom, knowledge and the possibility of anticipating, of transcending the immediate present” – on, that is, having a grasp on the future, as opposed to merely the now. And this leads quickly to a rapid ‘phenomenological’ account of Aristotelian authority, in which, Kojève tells us (the eccentric capitalisations are his):
The Master has the right to exercise an Authority over the Slave because he can anticipate, whereas the latter only notices immediate needs and is guided exclusively by these. It is therefore, if we like, the Authority of the ‘intelligent’ over the ‘unthinking’, of the ‘civilised’ over the ‘barbarian’, of the ‘ant’ over the ‘grasshopper’ [this is presumably a reference to Aesop], of the ‘clear-sighted’ over the ‘blind’.
This, he goes on – remember, this is being written in 1942 – to say that it is this form of authority which accounts for the “the dux, the Duce, the Führer, the ‘political leader’ and so on”.
This requires some unpacking. What Kojève means is that this form of authority is predicated on the ability to see further than others; it is a justification for being in charge that is based on being the only one who has a clear project in mind, and therefore the only one who is in a position to give orders. In such a situation, those who do not have a project, or who are not able to give orders, fall into line and are willing to cede authority if they accept that they “see less well and less far”. And Kojève uses a very simple illustration of this:
A band of kids gather to play. One of these kids proposes to go and steal apples from the orchard next door. Immediately, by doing so, he casts himself in the role of the band’s leader. He became this leader because he saw further than the others, because it was he alone who thought out a project, while the others did not manage to get beyond the level of immediate facts.
It will be immediately seen that, in this aspect at least (Kojève was at pains to make clear that this was only indeed one element of the very complex makeup of the modern state), modern government – with its special interest in the future – reveals a strongly ‘Aristotelian’ streak in the terms in which Kojève here represents it. Modern government, as we have seen, derives its authority from the fact that it sees further than the people – it knows, or can predict, the future – and from having a project in mind for responding to it. I know, government says, that if (say) a particular virus is allowed to spread unchecked then X million number of people will die, and I know how to act so as to forestall that outcome. I have, to repeat, a project, and you – the population – will cede authority to me on that basis. It is really just a glorified variation on children stealing apples, but just with a very large band of children and something much bigger at stake than the baking of a pie. Phenomenologically, then, it is clear that Kojève was onto something.
But it is his – very short – description of the conditions within which this form of authority emerges that is of particular interest. Here, he seems to emphasise that this means of establishing authority is a feature in particular of the very earliest and most primitive forms of rule, and indeed can be understood as the most elementary basis for human political organisation in the crudest sense:
Everything suggests that the first ‘true’ leaders emerged in the same manner: a band of ‘Masters’, ‘aristocratic brigands’, rally around a Leader who proposes a plan for a raid; and he is invested with an absolute Authority as long as the execution of his project lasts: he is a ‘dictator’ or even a ‘king’.
And it will immediately be seen that here we get a very clear understanding of the characteristics of human authority in, as it were, the state of nature – where somebody who happens to have a claim to be able to see further and who therefore has a project in mind stakes his claim to be in charge. And it will likewise be seen that this is a plausible account of what human authority looks like phenomenologically, and of the basic pattern or structure upon which it rests, when every other justification has been stripped away. When there is no theological basis for authority, or legitimation through the dispensation of justice, there is only really might-makes-right (which is not really authority so much as coercion) or the ‘Aristotelian’ appeal which Kojeve stakes out: I should be the one who governs, because I can see the future and have a plan to respond to it, and you do not.
From this, we are given an important insight. The modern state, and the global governance system, for all their purported sophistication, are in many ways driven to derive their authority from the least sophisticated basis of all: seeing far, and claiming that the ability precisely to project themselves and their followers forward into the future is a legitimate ground to boss everybody else around. And this goes a long way to explaining why it is that the future is such an obsession for our leaders – whose framework of governance, let us remind ourselves, is “fragile and obsessive” (as, again, Michel Foucault put it), and lacking any justification for its authority at all save for the highly contingent claim to be governing effectively. In the end, all that this boils down to is the logic of the children and the apples, although of course it is presented in much more high-falutin terms than that: “forg[ing] a new international consensus on how we deliver a better present and safeguard the future”, as the Summit of the Future might put it.
As schematic as they may be, then, Kojève’s comments on the phenomenology of his ‘Aristotelian’ theory of authority are highly apposite for our current governing moment, showing to us why it is that seeing the future and claiming to have a hold on it has become so important, and why it is that in particular government in modernity should slide so easily into this modality – deriving from its lack of legitimacy, its lack of grounds and its lack of any moral or principled justification for its status. This alone makes these comments worth paying attention to.
But, as promised, revealing the logic of the authority of modern government in this way also opens it up to potential avenues of criticism. And this leads us to two further, I think valuable, reflections in closing.
First, we are hereby provided with a clear understanding of why it is that, at both state and global level, the world’s governing classes are so concerned about the spreading of ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’ and countervailing narratives in general. If one derives one’s claim to authority from the ‘fact’ that one knows the future, then it obviously follows that one will jealously guard that privilege by denying to anybody else the capacity to suggest that the future may look a little different, or may indeed be uncertain. And this suggests that it is through alternative appeals to authority – on the basis of spiritual or theological derivations, or on the basis of a properly worked-out theory of justice – rather than just competing ‘projects’, that genuinely alternative models of government will emerge. Conservatives, take note: merely having a different idea about how to steal apples from the orchard, or some ideas about different games to play on a sunny afternoon, is not in itself enough. What is necessary is a competing basis of authority entirely to the one that modern government currently rests upon.
Second, we also gain an understanding of how it is that our contemporary governing model will come to an end. If one’s authority rests on seeing further than everyone else – on knowing the future and having a project to achieve within it – then it only takes the future turning out differently for one’s position of authority to collapse like the proverbial house of cards. And we can all, I think, see this playing out in real-time all around us. Those who govern us are continuously telling us: a) what the future will look like, and b) how they intend to govern it. As the future turns out to be very different to the picture they have painted, and as their projects to govern it come to naught or dissolve into disorder, then we will inevitably see new and better patterns of government emerge – it cannot be otherwise, though it may take longer than any of us would wish.
The Summit of the Future is very important, then, in telling us a great deal about what the future has in store: uncertainty, mystery, struggle, hope. None of these, ironically enough, are contained in the Pact for the Future itself. But they lie in store nonetheless, taking into account what the text represents: the least sophisticated and most childlike form of authority of them all, and therefore the most likely to be ultimately superseded.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
A psychologist – evidently too ignorant and stupid to understand the issues here, because you’d have to be profoundly ignorant, or profoundly stupid, or lying, to claim to still believe that this disease is genuinely frightening..
No surprise he’s advising this government and being given a platform to harm the country through membership of SAGE.
How very very true. We know many of these so called “academics” today are virtually pig-ignorant. They certainly have no understanding of history, culture and creativity.
Many seem wholly unqualified to offer anything other than personal opinions or prejudices. It’s all roughly equivalent to running a suggestions box, tombola or lucky (?) Dip. A pity that the Mail and others are so dense that they don’t realise these vile, overvalued fools are conning them.
They do realise it — The Daily Mail and others are just looking for headlines and clicks — they don’t give a fig what damage it is doing to genuinely frightened people —- The Daily Mail have been a disgrace
What bleeds, leads
The Mail and others are in on the con!
Many in the media and in government benefit personally from Pharmaceutical company profits, and ‘Big Pharma’ advertising keeps many media outlets afloat
Or spirituality..in it’s widest sense.
Nether ignorant nor stupid, but greedy, corrupt and intent on hanging onto the influence and power enjoyed by SAGE members for the last 16 months. Never in the field of human science was so much suffering inflicted on so many by so few experts.
This guy is a social psychologist. As far as I can see, he’s no expert in the domains of physical health or mental health. The fact that he’s so frightened at the prospect of dropping further covid restrictions suggests that he’s suffering with his own mental health and needs professional help.
Yes – it does – What is wrong with this man —
His mental health may be poor, however, I’m sure his financial health is excellent.
Surely he’s not taking advantage – unbelievable.
Most SAGE members are leaching off the taxpayer. They are socialists and communists and need to be swept away like dead leaves on the garden path.
Isn’t Michie a millionaire commie, straight out of the Chinese model
This arsehole should front at our local Stand in The Park and talk to some real people whose lives have been devastated by this ‘ behavioural brainwashing stuff they peddle in the safety of their comfy houses…
How about standing him in front of a firing squad?
We have to hope that Javid holds his nerve, because it’s pretty much a given that over the next fortnight the SAGEers are going to be popping up in the media regularly with their ‘too soon’ predictions of doom, and trying to force the government to do what they are told.
Try telling that to all the sectors of the economy who have had their livelihoods trashed over the past 18 months…
I don’t think the twat has stepped out his front door for the past year, sat at home sorting his book collection A-Z earning his full salary thinking I’m alright jack. No fuckin’ clue about the real world.
I am wondering why lockdown sceptics gave this gentleman so much air time? No one even heard of him til this article. But suddenly he is given centre stage.
Gentleman?
A gentleman is indeed a rarity nowadays.
Quite – not dealing almost daily with hospitality having to self-isolate because somebody else tested positive with a test that’s got problems to say the least. Javid was completely right in saying that we can improve people’s overall health by opening up. It’s time for Covid trumps all other diseases to simply stop.
Yes, the next fortnight is going to be relentless interviews and articles like this trying to get government to back down. Javid should try to get Greg Abbott and Ron De Santis to publicly support him to counter it.
I wish he would get DeSantis or Abbott to publicly support him…. I do wonder Javid will recognise anyone with a backbone – he hasn’t seen one in our Government that is for sure
Again and Kristi Noem!!
And Kristi Noem. People always forget about South Dakota and I think she’s the best and that’s not just for the obvious reason – honest!
“Please sir! I’ve found a variant. It looks really scary!!”
How do they find the variants? (Genuine question)
The answer to his question is him.
He’s just too stupid to realise that what matters is the health of everyone in every respect, not just the handful that get covid. The moron doesn’t realise he is actually destroying the physical and mental health of millions.
I bet he does but this is his 15 minutes of fame.
Or does he?
Sajid javid is not really making the decisions, this is being driven by somebody bigger than mr. Javid and it isn’t sage.
Pharma Gates?
An idiot from Independent SAGE just turned up on the BBC. They aren’t letting go.
Professor Stephen Reicher is quite clearly mad. Can he really be a ‘leading’ psychologist or is he just some nutter off the street who blagged his way into a SAGE meeting and has never left. I think the only part of his description that is correct is the ‘psycho’ part. How can the government uncritically accept the blathering of these people?
You hide away in your book lined study mate, and let the rest of us get on with it. Bet all his books are shit, too. Twat.
He works on things like the collective psychology of fear. No aurprises there.
Marxist dialectical bollox…or porn…
Stephen Reicher; whoever you are, (a complete, irrelevant nonentity as far as I’m concerned)…..
Please, please…. just fuck off.
Couldn’t put it better myself.
Neither could I!
#me too! Sorry couldn’t resist it.
Well argued, and to the point.
But what about his life work: putting the shits up the populace for no discernible reason? Surely he’s entitled to some praise?
Reicher should examine his own behaviour. As a behavioural researcher on the economic side I would suggest that like many psychologists his own neuroticism and narcissism is the driving behaviour. As one of the chief plague bell ringers, his grandiose fearmongering will be played up by the equally guilty MSM. I am no Tory supporter but from a policy point view Javid needs to keep his eyes on the prize and put SAGE and it’s catastrophic cast of hand wringers and panic merchants back in the box.
Dear Professor Reicher, precisely which modelling outputs did you “vote” against since you were appointed a member of SAGE or, if that is not the case, do you consider the number of positive cases resulting from RT PCR tests with a CT of over 35 to be a true and accurate measure of people who are infectious at the time of their test, regardless of their symptoms? Have you lobbied within SAGE for confirmatory tests in EACH RT PCR derived positive test – yes or no? Have you agreed with the definition of CV19 death – as amended – and what is the precise number of deaths following a RT PCR derived positive test, within the period where the virus is known to reach a critical load, where no co-morbidities have existed, since January 2020? Finally did you agree with the downgrading of CV19 from a “High Consequence Infectious Disease” in March 2020?
If the answers are , in turn, All of them, No, Yes, No, small and No, why are you still a member of SAGE? If you have answered in a different way to any of the questions in the last sentence, please shut up, get out a bit more and don’t darken doors again.
I’m not going to add anything intelligent to this conversation other than my contempt with the following words:
Fuck off you utter delusional cretin!
Sometimes straightforward profanity is the only reasonable response.
SAGE members, most of whom appear to have few qualifications and even less sense, are as numerous as fleas on a dog’s back. This latest oracle is merely a halfwit
Hands up who voted for SAGE?
I take it that upticks don’t count!
If you’re scared buy a stock of ffp3 masks or a hazmat suit.
Your health is your problem, not mine. My immune system works.
And lock yourself in your wardrobe…forever.
I’ve purposely created this account because someone finally needs to do something to shoot what I believe to be the biggest of all COVID lies: «Your behaviour affects my health.»
(and therefore, I’m justified to demand whatever I want from you to – unselfishly – protect me).
No, Sir Babyboomer (likely — the guy seems to keep his age secret), it doesn’t. As side effect of living and the corresponding bodily functions – completely beyond my control – my body might get infected with a virus. This virus may then – again completely beyond my control – pass on to other people in the same accidental way. YOUR behaviour affects your health. If you mix with other people, the above may also happen to your body. So don’t. We won’t miss you.
Well said!!
Baby Boomer here. I am horrified, disgusted, and a whole lot of unprintable stuff, with some of my fellow boomers. Note that it is limited to boomers ….
No offence intendend. I realize this is a bit of a broad brush. However, the scamdemic is again (to a large degree, at least) the work of the same people who have been behind every carefully orchestrated media armageddon in Europe (and the USA) since some time in the 1970s (the original one was “OMG! We’ll run out of oil!!”, in case someone still remembers that — ironically, one of the present crazes is “OMG! We’ll not run out of oil!!”).
As member of the “generation in between we pretend that doesn’t exist” (ie, Im too young to belong to them and too old to be among their children), I’m meanwhile thoroughly tired of this, because it seems someone else spent all of my life “fighting” against ever-changing imaginary desasters.
As Nietzsche once put it: One of the mark of the decadent is to transform the observation “I’m going under.” into the imperative “Everything shall perish!”
I’m a boomer too and similarly disgusted with almost all my boomer friends and relatives. I have been called “selfish” and “stupid” for refusing the vax and also “silly”. When challenged, none came up with any justification for their remarks. I’m incredulous
What’s frightening is that these collectivist ideologues have the power to have you committed and to shut down public life.
There isn’t a shred of evidence that “your behavior affects my health”. All the studies have shown that non-pharmaceutical interventions do nothing to stop the spread of the pandemic. We need to make sure that people like this never have any influence over our freedoms again.
What I find equally despicable is that MailOnLine and other media outlets trawl for such people and their Tweets knowing full well it sets people off against each other once again. Make no mistake, MSM NEVER want the current situation to end as they clearly love the division it creates.
Bang on!
Spot on, the MSM, of which the DM is by far the worst, doesn’t want this to end. All they care about is stirring up controversy, uncertainty and fear.
Sadly This is TREE
That was supposed to say TRUE
“Your behaviour affects my health.”
Well, your influence on governmental edicts affects the mental health of a significant proportion of the populace, and drives people to suicide.
We’ve had two incidents on the bridge near where I live this week, resulting in one death and one, luckily (!) surviving, albeit with shattered limbs. This takes the running total of jumpers to five in the last six months. Normally, we have zero incidents each year. And an acquaintance is off to the funeral of a friend’s son next week, who killed himself at home, leaving behind his young children. Of course, each of these six incidents might have nothing to do with the ongoing restrictions, but as I said, normally we get a minimal number of suicides locally.
Obviously, Mr Reicher, you value your own health above the lives of these six young men.
Mr Reicher can sit in his nice home whilst other people go to work to empty his bins, keep his utilities flowing in and out and pick, pack and deliver his internet orders. Did he offer to change places with any of these people so they could shelter at home?
Well said!
Reicher and his like are parasites, in the true sense of the word.
Looks like Mr Reicher hasn’t quite finished his public control experiment just yet, I bet he’s gutted. All the Sage scientists should be told to shut up by the government but Bozo is to pathetic. The MSM will have the Sage morons singing their fear laden doom for the next fortnight until number 10 submits again.
well it is but not for the reason you’re implying. Pretty sure covid isn’t killing youngsters like flu does.
I don’t often bother, but I just googled this person. He comes across as a nasty piece of work.
Anyone who remains a communist after the cruel and bloody history of the 20th century just has to be a nasty piece of work. And most of SAGE, if not all of them, are commies.
There is no doubt in my mind that a thorough and intensive investigation needs to be undertaken on the role that members of SAGE have embarked upon during this inhumane Covid debacle.
Just one of the lunatics currently in charge of the asylum..Och away wid ye ..ya self serving cowering timerous beastie!
The ATL appeals – “but we’ve all been jabbed” – are both pitiful and comical.
What a complete arse!
And …
“this isn’t an ‘I’ thing, it’s a ‘we’ thing.”
is really wacky because, in reality, it is 180 degrees the other way around. It is _they_, who are the embodiment of the ‘I’ mentality.
All of these deluded fanatics proclaiming that they are motivated by the ‘We’ principle.
What?!?!
This arse-about-face alternate-reality shit is extremely galling.
He and Michie have been instrumental in the fearmongering of the government throughout.
They have committed enough damage.
No more should it be allowed.
And yet the PM allows it. Is it his weakness, or are they following his orders, or what? We shall probably never know.
Johnson is merely a protected puppet who HAS to do as he is told….How on earth do you think a completely useless, lazy, low IQ, talentless imbecile has got so high up the ladder? He has survived so many scandals and misdemeanors that would have ended the careers of most other people years ago!!!
Does anyone know about this guy’s politics? Do we have another Communist here?
More theatre. Now I see what they will do with Javid, they will play on the fear and show him to be too reckless when actually he speaking on true themes. Behavioural brainwashing continues…
Its tempting to think these people are deuded. But they are not. They know exactly the effect of their words. They are the personification of evil.
What has happened is that they very recklessly agreed to the jab and are so much in denial about its inadequacies and dangers that for the survival of their fragile egos they need to prove that lockdowns and vaccines are the saviours
But yes that is evil behaviour
Fuck me the comments below that first Twitter post. I’d love to tear their silly comments, bed wetting lies and terrible attempts at logic to shreds here but really I cannot deal with the rage it would entail.
Don’t get excited. It’s all scripted.
the prospect of being hauled in front of Nuremberg II for crimes against humanity.
Now THAT is something that should be keeping him awake!
I hope so
I accept his premise that my actions have consequences and I take full responsibility for them.
Call off all the rules, let us do as we like and I will take personal responsibility for any harm I cause. If you can prove I made some one ill and died as a result I will take the rap.
Now will this psychologist who wants to tell everyone else how to live their lives take responsibility for his actions and for any damage.or harm he causes?
This (his premise) is just nonsense: Viruses spread independently of conscious human actions. There’s only one thing people can control here and that’s their own exposure.
Each time one of these fkers opens their mouths it adds 2 years to the date when I might sit down and think about having the vaccine.
Two articles that epitomise the debate, this is opinion of a learned man – we just don’t know what he has learned is any good.
Then we have John A. Fairclough, an Hon. Consultant Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgeon at the University Hospital of Wales and Professor Emeritus at Cardiff Metropolitan University – a lifetime of integrity expressed in medical science.
Javid is in a different league to his predecessor he has already demonstrated his integrity – remember when PM wanted him to sack his treasury team – he resigned before betraying trust. He will go where he sees integrity.
A politician who recognises and values integrity? What miracle is this?
He’s a psychologist. He knows nothing about viruses and everything about how to manipulate people.
I live in fife near st andrews. All I can say is what a wanker!
The new nhs woke mantra to define life henceforth is ‘your behaviour affects my health’. Buy the rainbow sloganed t-shirts, posters and bracelets now.
I have come to despise the ubiquitous rainbow motif. Of course, there was nothing originally wrong with the rainbow. Unfortunately though (as happened with the defiling of the swastika), it has been appropriated by a bunch of arseholes. Because of what the ‘rainbow’ has now become synonymous with, I just regard it with contempt wherever I see it plastered.
A bit shite really.
Roy G Biv would be spinning in his grave.
I even get gloomy when I see a real rainbow, because it makes me think of the National Hellhole Disservice.
But I’m working on that. I will reclaim my rainbows.
Javid is going to have to be tough. I looked at his Twitter and there is some nasty push back there … usual stuff “Tories want to infect our children with a deadly disease”, “Tories interested in money over health”. It will be hard to resist all the covidista crap that will be thrown at him. And perhaps I am being silly thinking he could get his de Santas moment if he holds to this?
Here’s my letter to the DM in response:
Dear Sir/Madam,
If only psychologist Reicher could spare us and confine his opinionated rants to his subject area and deliver them only to SAGE! (MailOnline 4th July). This, of course, is merely a professional expectation so naturally far too much to hope for from this ludicrous fearmonger who seems recently to be focused solely on self-promotion and the media. Oh but then again, he’s presumably one of the “evil” individuals inciting fear across the UK via Govt advice in order to control and coerce us by utilising highly dubious and unethical means.
But on “we” versus “I”, what nonsense! If Reicher had given the remotest thought to the costs versus benefits of his absurd opinions, he might bump in to the extraordinary idea that he is the “I” and entirely selfish.
Yours faithfully
Professor Fionn Dunne
The DM are up to their old tricks. This guy appears not to be a member of SAGE but he is a member of Independent SAGE as of course is Susan Michie, who is a member of both.
Ah, if he is independent sage this then is a zero covid push back.
Yes, have now included links to the memberships of SAGE and Independent SAGE
Sorry, here are the links;
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/scientific-advisory-group-for-emergencies-sage-coronavirus-covid-19-response-membership/list-of-participants-of-sage-and-related-sub-groups#scientific-advisory-group-for-emergencies-sage
https://www.independentsage.org/
Yes, well done – this is evidently a man prepared to see children die of experimental vaccines.
It’s for their own good. If they die of the vaccine they won’t die of covid. Which is good.
BOTH SAGE and Independent SAGE are infested with complete and utter EVIL, grossly overpaid rubbish, so whichever committee of talentless clowns he is on is irrelevant!!
When this is all over (and it will be) these power-hungry self-serving maniacs will no longer be relevant anymore, their earnings will fall dramatically and in most cases dry up completely and they will have to go back to the dull humdrum lives they came from and become the sad little boring twerps they were before the lockdowns began begging for government funds – this is what these experts fear most … an end to the gravy train – and this why they must keep the fear going.
Meanwhile in Florida …
.
Notice the manipulation of words to change the meaning. Javid says we will have to learn to live with Covid19, just like we have learned to live with flu. Reicher twists that and claims that Javid thinks Covid19 *is* flu.
Who exatcly voted for the Behavourial & Psychology Party in 2019?
I guess the fact he’s being paraded by the media means Javid is not a fully fledged member of the Covidian cult at least for the time being.
Why are these far left activists advising a conservative PM on covid lockowns?
Left-wing bias of scientists on Independent Sage urging for harsher Covid rules
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/15177360/left-wing-bias-of-independent-sage/
Personally, I’m a lot more worried by the likes of Professor Third Reicher being given an uncritical platform.
Quick scan of the Twitter comments shows how many zero Covid acolytes are still at work – and they call us tinfoil hatters.
Can someone on here remind me of the New Zealand lady doctor’s name and where I can find her videos? Is she censored on youtube?
Dr Sam Bailey. She has a YouTube channel but only posts content that will not be censored. Try her odysee channel:
https://odysee.com/@drsambailey:c
many thanks
I am genuinely surprised that there hasn’t been at least one attempt to take out a member of SAGE by somebody whose life and livelihood has been destroyed by them.
Lucky that there hasn’t been, though, that would be very helpful to them.
Not a scientist, a witch doctator, a communist doomsday cultist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Reicher
http://bbcprisonstudy.org/bbc-prison-study.php?p=56
Prof Reicher studies collective behaviour. He participated in the BBC prison study, looking at how groups behave when divided into “prisoners” and “guards”.
He has all the credentials for advising the government on how to manipulate the public during this coronascam, to maintain fear and submission.
Independent SAGE are a political organisation with political aims. They seemingly have free rein to campaign for their aims on MSM, whilst some are officially advising the Government. Their views are extremist and dangerous. How is this allowed to happen? I’m sick and tired of hearing from these lunatics, when distinguished alternative voices are being censored and silenced.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1457950/lockdown-labour-scientists-plot-bit-more-restrictions
“The Sunday Express has learnt that members of Independent Sage are to be part of the launch of an international group called the World Health Network which will push for a “zero covid” strategy of maintaining lockdowns. The revelation came at an online meeting of the Zero Covid campaign group last week where trade union officials told attendees about how covid is a means of recruiting members and how the ultimate goal has to be “to bring down capitalism.”
“It follows MPs last month questioning why three Independent Sage members including Professor Michie, her husband Professor Robert West, and Professor Stephen Reicher, all behavioural scientists, are also official government advisors.”
Surely senior government types are aware of all this? Why are they even tolerating communists, etc. having ANY influence on policy? Time and again we vote against this type of thing and yet here we are again…
Is psychology a science? There appears to be considerable debate and disagreement over that and many, myself included, believe it to be a pseudoscience.
So, perhaps the headline should be “SAGE Pseudoscientist …….” , the latter of which appear to be over-represented on SAGE.
There have been some very good practitioners in the Black Arts of “psychology” in the fairly recent past. Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam, the ISIS gang and a few others spring immediately to mind. None of them were at St. Andrews, but perhaps this Milo Mindbender should stick to giving advice to that woman in charge of the Republic of Scotland.
The truly frightening thing is that idiots like this are ‘educating’ our children.
What a wuss.
As for Indie Sage, words fail me, until I recall seeing Alice Roberts on BBC Breakfast TV once. She appeared to be so alarmed at the toxicity of chicken that she warned against washing the plastic containers it’s sold in; she advised bagging it up and disposing of it unwashed. Apparently the droplets from washing the container would splatter all over surfaces (she must be a very messy cook) and cause contamination and collywobbles (or, lingering, agonising death…)
She’s probably vegan. She should stick to digging holes, go back to Time Team and stop being a pain.
Where do they find these people?
I once wrote an email to Dr Alice Roberts, asking some “silly” questions about the content of one of her nonsensical BBC episodes. I did eventually receive a response from her (quite a few months later) but it had absolutely nothing to do with the content of my email.
Enough said.
“Your behaviour affects my health”. Well how ironic.
Looking and listening to this man brings symptoms of sickness on me —
Stephen Reicher is not qualified to tell us whether the virus is flu or not. I can’t help wondering if some of the money in his current account has come from Bill and Mel.
A SAGE scientist frightened?
About bloody time.
Sack the lot of them for the way they have spread fear.
They would be if only protesters gathered outside their homes. Their addresses need to be published.
What a 100% useless MORON
Clearly its time for SAGE to be disbanded. Government advisors cannot be twittering against government policy. It is time for them to be silenced.
At last SAGE is being sent a message by a minister that scares them rather than the other way round and the poor things don’t like it their power is being removed their influence is being ignored!! Great give it to them minister shut up and get back to you lab it’s over!!
Lab? Most of them are behavioural psychologists and computer modellers, the former, woke Lefties, and the latter if their predictions are anything to go by, would be as well off with an abacus as a computer.
So he does not want to loose his power- it mist have been enjoyable watching the sheeple cowering and running to corners to escape the shepherd.
The one piece of evidence these SAGE health tyrants are currently able to quote are the daily case numbers (dodgy test results). In all this talk of easing restrictions there does not seem to have been any talk of winding down the ludicrous testing system. Indeed they are talking of increasing testing in schools to replace the isolation procedure.
These tests themselves are harmful and we should stop testing children. The tests themselves are ludicrous, I understand that for these LFT tests you do the test yourself and enter the results yourself, testing done in this way should only ever be used as an early indicator that you maybe need a properly conducted accurate test, DIY tests should not be used to guide Public Health Policy.
But everyday they publish these scary lists of infections (dodgy tests) and these SAGE tyrants use this information to underpin their statements. Yet there seems no sign that this testing monster is going to be put back in its box.
Not to mention that children are getting positive tests using orange juice, coca cola, etc. Adults can do that too of course……
Hear hear!!
There’s nothing scary about these “infections”. We’re presently in a completely new phase of this “pandemic” because the number of “infections” per number of “hospitalizations” has risen to unparallelled heights very steeply since April, keeps rising and the rise is accelerating.
This number has reached 40 once, on the day when a large number of cases accidentally dropped on the floor due to limitation of Excel was added. It was below 20 most of the time during the “winter wave”. As of 2021/07/01, the number had reached 121.5.
NB: Graph has been created from official government numbers (published as JSON).
Taking someone seriously who believes that swimming and swimming caps are rascist is beyond parody.
Isn’t this a bit like a Barclays Bank employee telling the media that the Barclay brothers are ripping people off? Adviser’s advise, bosses take their advice or they don’t. If they don’t and then the advisers go behind their boss’s back and moan about it to the world, should they actually keep their jobs?
Don’t think the Barclays are associated with the bank. Easy assumption to make, but no.
What about Banksy?
Daily testing in schools is hidden in there. More grooming of children to be compliant to abuse.
I would prefer to read an article about ivermectin. What a great time to use it. Will the UK ever come out of lockdown? Does anyone else think Sajid Javid decided to treat COVID like flu blah blah blah two minutes after taking the job as health secretary. Of course he didn’t. He is taking his orders from higher up and I don’t mean sage.
‘SAGE’, if ever there was a misnomer , it’s that. They ars a bunch of pseudo intellectuals, brainwashed by a Left education system and bent on bringing the rest of civilisation down to their miserable level.
Once again I ask, why on earth is anyone still taking any notice of idiots like this?
How is a psychologist considered any more qualified to pronounce on this then the very intelligent gentleman who just cleaned my windows? Our society is nuts.
Too many of these so-called experts have driven our response to covid with devastating effects. Believing 128,000 deaths is a badge of honour is totally sick when a different response would have made a big difference. Psychology is seen as a soft science no two would ever agree on anything and have no expertise on covid to be taken seriously. I hope as the new health secretary becomes more established sage will be seen how damaging they were and be closed down or at least be made up of real experts.
Quite honestly I couldn’t give a damn what the liars at Sage say. They should all face the consequences of their actions sooner rather than later.
Which is why I think protests should be outside the homes of members of these SAGE committees.
His 15 minutes of fame, and the gravy train that goes with it, are coming to an end. Sad.
If only.
Stephen Reicher, frightened. Well here’s my remedy, crawl back into the hole you came from and stay there…
Unbe-fucking-lievable! “…this isn’t an ‘I’ thing, it’s a ‘we’ thing. Your behaviour affects my health.”
Here’s a man speaking on behalf of an organisation that is promoting unconsensual medical experimentation on the whole of the UK population; is stifling peoples’ ability to run a business, get an education, worship, get married, socialise, travel, hug an aging relative or attend their funeral, and is encouraging people to cover their faces with rags that are produced, packaged and marketed with no safety regulations, are known to harbour life-threatening pathogens, are causing the wearer to inhale up to 6 times the safe level of carbon dioxide and are scientifically contentious regarding their efficacy. And yet – according to Stephen Reicher – *I’m* a danger to *his* health.
We need a good succinct response to this garbage. Any ideas?
Succinct response –
.303″, 45 calibre or 7.62mm any or all to head / chest
Are they for me MJ or the person subject of my rant? If it’s me, in some ways it would be a mercy killing
Haha, yes Felice. On reflection, that was quite a long sentence wasn’t it?
“Consider yourself lucky that my behaviour DOESN’T affect your health right now” :->
Saj’s huge in tray says a lot about Hancock and it’s nothing good. Basically he lost the plot to the disservice of us all
Ahhh have just read that a trade union leader say people returning to work need to be confident that the work place is “Covid Secure”!! Those two words make me want to scream!! Which bit of learn to live with risk does he not understand!! And the is no such thing as Covid Secure
We need ALL behavioural pseudo scientists out of Government now. They are not in the best interests of our mental health or our future as a society. It seems to me they have captured the population through fiendish means and intend to use our vulnerability to further their social experiments.
I did a psychology degree and came to the conclusion that the old ways of strong families and caring communities were the best way forward in crises. We have been broken by people who care nothing for these traditions.
Nudgers by definition think that only they know best. They do not trust people at all and to an overwhelming degree actually detest humans.
Noone should have ever enlisted or tasked them with anything, let alone listen to them.
Professor Stephen Reicher, followed by psychologist, followed by SAGE says it all. These guys need locking away and forbidden to speak publicly about their “advice” and send it through proper – peer reviewed – channels.
Another one pushing the obscene vaccine agenda when cures/remedies and preventive measures are well established and proven to be effective in other parts of the world but have been deliberately suppressed by Big Pharma and governments. In other words, the remedies should have absolute priority over experimental vaccines.
Can someone PLEASE tell these SAGE (non-)scientists that they must remain silent. Their job is NOT to ‘message’ the public, which has a continual record of unjustified scaremongering.
1. He is a psychologist so what’s the fucker doing on SAGE ?.
2. He is a psychologist so what does he know about viruses and epidemiology ?.
SAGE are the enemy
Aye, the enemy, and a very clever one, at that. Saying the masks must be worn to protect others was a master-stroke of social and behavioural engineering.
Is this ignorant and stupid individual from the Goebbels and Mengele Memorial Brigade (GMMB) really worth a comment?
This is how stupid the effer is…
https://twitter.com/ReicherStephen/status/1411636130936672257
Actually thinks comparing a situation where we abandon the Highway Code with Javid’s approach to Covid management is perceptive and a clincher of an argument. Watatwat.
His attempts at philosophy (thinking the fact that as creatures made of genes we can alter our genetic code destroys determinism as phisophical idea) also show what a shallow thinker he is. And yet he wants to rule over us and decide all the health risks we are prepared to take.
Johnson is absolutley useless to have allowed this situation to develop where third rate intellects on SAGE call the shots.
So being able to change DNA frees us from the laws of physics?
Let us not be distracted by those little shits wheeled out in support of the huge tornado of the global shit-show.
The mind-games and the manipulation never stopped.
Third rate intellectuals are all that you can expect because anyone that’s good at their job and intelligent generally gets on with things, whereas ‘frightened’ people like this end up looking for the safety of the public sector or academia.
Don’t people like this have have concept of how to operate as part of a key and hopefully secure advisory board to the government? If I had somebody working on such a sensitive project, they’d be shown the door if they kept going on social media to undermine the position. I’ve be allied to medical communications for a long time and I’m pretty sure that health care professionals taking part in advisory boards are bound by NDA.
If they don’t agree with the decisions that the government are making then resign and attack from a neutral position. But don’t make cheap shots from the side lines. It makes a mockery of the entire process.
Especially when all you have to say can be summarised as ‘Lies and Bullshit. ‘
He looks like Vic Reeves, or the guy of Mythbusters.
Oh god have just listened to my boss’s going on about how to proceed after the 19th and to say they are on planet Covid is an understatement!! Dear god mass brain washing has happened! It looks like unless Boris definitely says you don’t have to we will still be hands face space!!
I know what I’d be telling him…
Worth watching
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuMbRBTZhCY&feature=youtu.be
One thing I find annoying about this site is that clicking on links does not open a separate window, and clicking on the back button comes back to this page but at a different level. The reddit LS site opens a different window, I think that’s much better.
a) The flu is more dangerous than Covid.
b) At most, it’s us versus them, not an I versus We thing.
Saying so confesses what this is really about for him and his lot though: the replacement ofbour unalienable individual rights in the name of utilitarianism, with the leaders of those utilitarian movements calling the shots and having absolute power.
Which is why this must be resisted and overturned again!
Bit late to this particular party, still, I need to get something off my chest.
Fuck off, Mr “Professor” Reicher. Fuck right off and don’t come back. Perhaps fuck off to Uganda – I gather from today’s news that you’ll fit right in.
Oh, did I forget to tell you to fuck off?
Another devi. I’m famous for five minutes. I’m chief bedwetter. I’m chief doom monger. I’m so so sick of these zpurts.
I think Boris & Co have a big line-up of them. It looks as if they’ve missed the Grinch’s answerphone message:
“If you utter so much as one syllable, I’LL HUNT YOU DOWN AND GUT YOU LIKE A FISH!”
The key message of the pandemic,” he said on Twitter, “is this isn’t an ‘I’ thing, it’s a ‘we’ thing. Your behaviour affects my health.”
And is it a ‘we’ thing when it comes to care home deaths, and no ICU for elderly covid patients, and cancer treatment stopped, and screening stopped, and children subjected to mental torture and all the other harms we have been subjected to..? What an evil selfish man.. one of those Laura Dodsworth’s book documents.
Millions of jobs lost…careers that haven’t taken off…weddings postponed…lovers denied the chance to meet…places not seen…
This sickj-looking man is the very sympol of the anti-life spirit that has taken hold of academia.
Daily testing of pupils isn’t freedom, or a return to anything worth having. Testing is a nonsense.
I see Reicher from the hallowed but ‘totally divorced from reality’ establishment the University of St Andrews is looking rather worn out and perhaps a tad nervous.
Can he and his pitiful ilk dimly discern the sound of tumbrels in the distance?
I hope so.
And what the hell his profession knows about anything beyond their favourite experiments – such as seeing if an ‘instructor’ can get a ‘subject’ to electrocute a ‘victim’, is quite beyond me.
Presumably he’s had the vaccine. Could explain his very unhealthy look and his continuing fear he might catch Covid.
So some people will still wear their Masks in crowded places out of courtesy!! So those of who won’t be will be made to feel bad!! Shame on you Boris and co for that sung virtue signalling statement!! You should have kept your personal decision to your self!!
Never felt bad so far why would I now?
If I could invent a voodoo doll that actually inflicted pain on these brain dead, obfuscating idiots, there would be a row of at least a dozen somewhere in my home that would be attended to regularly every week. It is only articles like John Fairclough’s here on the 4th July that actually keep me sane.
I worked for 30 years as a frontline RN/RM with many brilliant and experienced medics. A few were a disappointment, but largely they were dedicated, practical men and women who enhanced our professional life and taught us a great deal.
After years of puerile public health advice I’m not sure why I thought the PHE version would present a similar learned and considered front during a pandemic, but I did have some considerable expectations. They have, almost without exception, been utterly dismal.
This has been a year of anti-science on the public health front. If Whitty and his few medically trained sidekicks, followed by their acolyte behaviourists and related modellers, had wandered up and down in apothecaries garb and masks, ringing bells and chanting, we would have had just as much sense applied as they actually set forth on their regular lecturn sermons.
End of rant. Apologies.
Yet another member of SAGE aiming to extend their 15 minutes of ‘fame’.
I’m sure that no right thinking person takes any notice of this nonsense any more than they take heed of Ferguson’s wildly inaccurate apocalyptic predictions. These people are nothing but dangerous clowns.