In the latest episode of London Calling, James and I discuss the declining case numbers – and where that leaves SAGE’s crystal ball gazers – as well as why I won’t boo footballers taking the knee and Season 2, Episode 1 of Ted Lasso, which I’m excited about because the new season is set in the Championship, home of my team, QPR.
You can listen to the episode here and subscribe to London Calling on iTunes here.
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Tory biosurveillance fantasy is chilling and farcical in equal measure
A doomed political gamble on dystopian apps as a way out of the pandemic is a devastating blow to personal privacy SHERELLE JACOBS
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/07/26/tory-biosurveillance-fantasy-chilling-farcical-equal-measure/#comment
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I think Delingpole is great. He has kept me sane for months.
London Calling.. I don’t bother listening any longer.. just Toby is so dull.. I just can’t do thicko and/or ring-fenced analysis any longer… it wastes time and it’s dull.
Yes; I can’t help thinking that Toby, unlike James, has not yet fully realised that you cannot placate bullies. TY keeps inching in the direction of the official narrative so that, he thinks, he won’t look too bad; instead he just looks weak. Sad.
This is the story of the entire C20th/C21st period for the “Conservative” Party, as it was for the US Republican Party pre-Trump.
In the early part of the period there were some genuine conservatives in the background or amongst donors who could be relied upon to at least covertly try to stop the surrenders being too genuine, but in the latter part (the past three decades or so) those kinds seem to have been completely driven out or excluded from influence.
The surrenders became genuine and the placating of actual conservative voters became fake.
Trump is a New York liberal who agrees with Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Greta Thunberg on protectionism.
If Trump is conservative, Ayn Rand was correct to write an obituary for conservatism in 1960, it stands for nothing and can achieve only destruction.
Point of order: just being on a football pitch doesn’t make you a footballer. Some people there are officials, mascots, streakers, or political activists.
“why I won’t boo footballers taking the knee“
As discussed the other day, on the required genuflections to antiracist dogma, even the supposed resistance like Toby (and even RD) can only argue from within the faith.
It’s as though they were dissidents in a theocracy trying to argue against politicisation of sport and the theocracy were requiring a religious prayer at the start of all sporting events, and all they can manage to do is to say “well obviously a religious prayer is fine and not political at all, we just don’t want that particular extremist fanatic group mentioned”.
Basically they concede the war even as they try to fight the battle.
Or perhaps they are trying to fight the war in a way it can won? Society hasn’t become obsessed with race (aka racist) overnight and we won’t go back to being a more sane society overnight either. Battles have to be won and bridgeheads have to be built in people’s mind and at the moment, in the middle of a huge and irrational moral panic, you won’t win by trying to take it all on at once.
If you were charge in June 1944 would your plan have been “let’s just parachute everyone into Berlin – that’s where the real enemy is, not messing about on some French beach.”
You don’t win wars through surrenders. Dunkirk was desperate rescue to lesson a loss, not a cunning strategy.
I was talking about D-Day.
You win by being smart. If the “progressives” had come out with their big CRT push 10 years ago they’d have been chased out of town. Instead they drip-fed their nonsense until it seeped into the mainstream/
You can be noble all you want; and purist about “any concession is surrender” etc – but you’ll just lose to a more strategic enemy.
I’d prefer a winning strategy to a self-righteous losing one.
I don’t think Mark is being self-righteous, and neither am I. It’s about looking at the history of “culture wars” and trying to learn from it.
Whatever strategy “conservatives” are employing, it’s not self-righteous and neither is it winning.
No it’s not winning. That’s why I don’t advocate that either. As I say; It’s not about surrendering more it’s about taking it back slowly and carefully and smartly.
As with taking the knee – total moral panic; you won’t win the argument because the enemy does not fight fair. So you win the bits you can – you point out the fact BLM supporters kill people. They do, so it hard to defend against that. You make the connection between the gesture and a racist ideology and then maybe you win back 1% of the less rabid supporters of knee-taking.
Bit by bit you erode support by drawing off the more rational
Supporters until all that is left is the hard core. Then – and only then; when they are exposed and no longer supported by the majority a you rip them a new one and kick them in their/they balls.
That’s the only way we win this.
I’m not aware of any football crowds pointing out that BLM supporters kill people. What would be their mechanism for doing that?
Why not boo the Marxist loons making their racial power salutes, and point out (in other venues in other ways) that they are murderous racial supremacists?
What is gained by not booing them?
In reality what happens is that you maybe win back 1% at a time (while conceding the underlying poison), and after a long period of time you’ve perhaps started to win back enough that you can start to think about implementing the “rip them a new one” tactic quite soon, and just about then a completely new bunch of extremists kick up a new moral panic (based on the same underlying poison you can’t dispute because you’ve already tactically conceded it).
And the whole ratcheting process moves a little further on.
This isn’t rocket science, nor is it speculation. It’s simple observation of how the process has worked over the past century or so, on almost every single issue that conservatives have tried to resist the radicals on.
But in reality I think the defeat is in your own hearts (yours and Toby’s and the rest of those who want to “tactically” concede to antiracism, supposedly for pragmatic reasons).
I suspect you have internalised and implicitly accepted the radical dogmas that say “it’s not politics to make antiracist virtue signals, it’s just basic decency”, “racists, and anyone who isn’t sufficiently antiracist, are not just wrong, they are evil”.
I expect you’re right. I strongly believe in treating people as I find them, individually, and it’s not hard to see how this belief, shared by many, gets extended to the point where making observations about race feels wrong.
This was a huge issue within the online tech community in the 1990s and early 2000s. Most of the community was instinctively libertarian, which meant they tended towards tolerating all opinions, but the left was pushing the idea of “not tolerating intolerance” as a pretext for censoring conservative opinions.
The problem was that defending free speech meant defending opinions that were genuinely obnoxious to most libertarians, and many argued that we should not do so for similar tactical reasons as advanced above by artfelix. The argument was that if we tried to defend all speech we would lose because of being associated with obnoxious racists, so we should placate the censors by essentially throwing racists to the wolves in the hope that would win over moderates to the idea of freedom of speech for the rest.
Of course it didn’t happen that way. The “racists” were banned and then the idea of what was “offensive”, “extreme” or “unacceptable” shifted ever further as the centre shifted leftwards. The end was what we see today – systematic and open intolerance of dissent in the mainstream, and open censorship online, and we are still fighting a rearguard action against going even further, and being told “the only sensible thing to do is compromise”. So much for placating the wolves.
“If the “progressives” had come out with their big CRT push 10 years ago they’d have been chased out of town. Instead they drip-fed their nonsense until it seeped into the mainstream/“
The more accurate interpretation is that people surrendered to “moderate antiracism” and that made that ideology the received opinion. The “centre ground”. Then inevitably people who took that for granted adopted positions either side of it, and some used it as the basis for going further.
That’s what happens when you concede defeat on an ideological position. It becomes the new moderate and extremes form around it
I agree thats why we here. But now we are here, in this hole we dug for ourselves, we need to be smart about how we get out. It doesn’t mean conceding more ground, it means taking back ground slowly.
“ it means taking back ground slowly”
Sadly there’s no-one in mainstream politics doing that. The Tories are going in the opposite direction.
No they aren’t. Because we are so deep in the panic that we haven’t even got to winning back mainstream politics. But Toby (who I am not always the biggest fan of) is right to tread carefully on the knee-taking because it won’t get back into mainstream political thinking until the panic is over, and the panic will only be over if we are careful and smart in how we dismantle it.
We need to gently nudge people not hit them with a mallet. Panics always end. They end quicker when they are encourage to burn themselves out, not when petrol is thrown on them.
Which panic are you talking about?
My interpretation is that he is talking about the current particular issue of support for BLM/”critical race theory”.
But I don’t think it can seriously sustained as the kind of excuse for emergency action that he is claiming it to be. Most of the real harms – demonisation and criminalisation of dissent, active indoctrination in schools and in wider society, promotion of hatred of “racists”, the use of “racism” as a pretext for smashing established institutions as “institutionally racist”,etc, long predate these particular current details.
Agreed
And the first, necessary prerequisite for recovering any ground at all is to recognise that dogmatic, ideological antiracism is the root of the problems (in this area). That it is not just a harmless, basic niceness, but a poisonous intolerant ideology that is used by the most vicious haters in our society to persecute people they hate, and by nasty power-seekers via identity lobbyist groups to leverage huge state and corporate funding into power for themselves.
I don’t expect people in public positions to say that openly, necessarily. But I do expect them to act on it by, for instance, standing firm where principled stands can be made, as on free speech and resisting politicisation of sport.
Not just surrendering to it yet again. Surrender demoralises potential resistance. Even a tactical defeat can be worth it if it inspires resistance.
Freedom of speech cannot be negotiable. As soon as you sit down at the table, you’re lost.
This is always the argument made for compromise, and in fairness it has a lot of force.
But so too do the arguments against preemptive surrender as a strategy.
In my view the actual history suggests that being terrified to be “the nasty party” and constantly surrendering preemptively (and perhaps more importantly surrendering in their hearts) has resulted in a society in which a “Conservative” Party has regularly won elections, but conservatives have never been represented in government.
Imo there are lines that should never be compromised on, and absolute freedom of speech (limited only by serious, direct and real harms, tightly interpreted) is one, as is state indoctrination.
(Fwiw, I wasn’t one of those down-voting your comment).
I would’nt disagree. But we have surrendered so much that we can’t default back to the position before surrender (by “we” I mean all rational people).
We’re in the middle of a moral panic. You can’t reason with panic and so you can’t engage at all with the enemy if you just wade in and trigger their irrational hatred. It shouldn’t be that way but it is. It’s like trying to talk to someone who is in a red mist and is screaming and shouting and smashing things. There’s nothing you can do until they have calmed down and so your first job is to talk them down carefully. That’s real world not some fantasy of free thinking brilliance that will cut through all their wrong thinking like an intellectual sabre.
We are at the point of talking down a maniac. Yes, our failure to stop them earlier is part of the reason we have to do that. But you can’t go back to the start so you have to work with what you’ve got not do things that will be counterproductive just because you wish it had never got to this point in the first place.
We’re in the middle of more than one moral panic – I assume you are talking about the slower burning antiracist one here, since that’s what this discussion is about, rather than the more intense covid panic.
Your analogy does not work when transferred to the mass political sphere. By his shift to “yes it’s ok to give political signals but we should understand why some people might misinterpret them”, all Toby and his ilk do is support the existing elite dogma that “racists” are inherently evil people and “racism” is an inherently evil creed that can and should be suppressed by force.
The real problem isn’t BLM, but the underlying intolerant fanaticism that it shares with broader antiracism.
Its called cowardice.
£43 per PCR test for travellers through the airlines discounts – they aren’t keeping it a secret – I’ve used Randox for 2,5 & 8 day PCR tests and they were spot on – obviously I’d rather there were none of these BS tests
paying over £100 a test is a mugs game
Listened to the podcast. Sounds like Toby is going to take the “vaccine” just so his masters will, at least for now, allow him watch QPR.
I do so like a man of principle !!
I don’t think the unvaccinated should hold out any hope of him fighting our corner any longer which is a shame. All his freedom patter kinda rings hollow now.
Of course he will. Like the Lesser Hitchens, he talks a good game, incites others do as he says, and then he’ll bend the knee himself.
I think the vaccine argument for adults has left the station – so many are now vaxxed and they can’t be unvaxxed – what will be will be, and good luck to them….
The big fight now is over vaccine passport/IDs – and we need the vaxxed in our corner against these IDs – people need to understand where these innocent sounding ‘safety’ measure can lead – social credit systems and total population tracking and control