Laura Dodsworth and I have filed a complaint with Ofcom about a report issued by the Behavioural Insights Team and Sky urging broadcasters to use sophisticated psychological techniques derived from behavioural science to persuade people to support the Government’s ‘Net Zero’ agenda. Sky proudly boasted in the report that it was already using these subliminal techniques, which we think is a breach of Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code – in particular, the prohibition on using “techniques which exploit the possibility of conveying a message to viewers or listeners, or of otherwise influencing their minds without their being aware, or fully aware, of what has occurred”. Here is the gist of our complaint, taken from our letter to Melanie Dawes, the Chief Executive of Ofcom:
We are writing to alert you to a broadcast license complaint we have made about Sky U.K. Our complaint concerns a partnership between Sky and Behavioural Insights U.K., Known as the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), a limited company that was partly owned by the Government at the time the report was published. We believe this partnership – and, in particular, Sky’s adoption of BIT’s recommendations about how to help the Conservative Government successfully implement one of its most political contentious policy, namely, Net Zero – contravenes the Broadcasting Code.
The partnership we’re referring to resulted in the publication of “The Power of TV: Nudging Viewers to Decarbonise their Lifestyles” and the launch of Sky’s ‘Sky Zero’ campaign, which recommended that broadcasters make use of “behavioural science principles”, including subliminal messaging (“nudging” in the parlance of BIT, which is colloquially known as the Nudge Unit), to encourage viewers to endorse and comply with Conservative Government policy. Alarmingly, the report recommends broadcasters utilise sophisticated psychological techniques to change the behaviour of children “because of the important influence they have on the attitude and behaviours of their parents”.
The letter is worth reading in full.
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Let’s get this straight. Ardern locked down her country, prevented almost everybody from acquiring any sort of natural protection and the pumped them all full of multiple shots which seem to have lowered resistance to infection, and then after more than a year of this opened the borders to all sorts of disease vectors.
From any logical analysis of the situation, this seems like foolishness and anti-scientific foolishness, to boot.
We’ve allowed lefties to metaphorically jerk off over liberty for nearly 3 years over a flu like disease. I think simply laughing at them is the most effective answer, as with their obsession about co2. Waste of time even engaging just carry on with life.
They’ve been doing this to liberty ever since the Bolshevik Revolution, or maybe the French Revolution.
The entire premise is flawed.
Bolsonaro’s handling of the “pandemic” can’t have been disastrous, for the very simple reason that he didn’t handle it. Others did.
First of all, the major decisions – like lockdowns – were handled at the state level by each of the states. Bolsonaro was against lockdowns but many states locked down anyway and closed schools. The major ones like Sao Paulo and Rio definitely did.
Secondly, things that were dealt with at a federal level went completely against his wishes. He didn’t believe in any form of mandates for jabs and yet Brazil has not allowed unjabbed visitors into the country. So someone other than Bolsonaro was handling decisions at the federal level.
This, of course, is just further proof that elected politicians only have the power that they are allowed to have. If like Bolsonaro or Trump to some degree they stray from the acceptable path, they are attacked and where powerful state institutions can override them, they do.
“If like Bolsonaro or Trump to some degree they stray from the acceptable path, they are attacked and where powerful state institutions can override them, they do.”
Or they are murdered.
A moot point anyway, we have all the evidence we need from Belarus and Sweden (and for that matter Florida).
I don’t like excess deaths because it compares the current death rate to the death rates of the previous three years and if the last three years in a region were not on trend, that skews the excess deaths statistic.
Deaths per hundred thousand is a valuable measure.
“Many commentators have claimed that South Americans are particularly susceptible to Covid”
That is absolute nonsense. Peru has the highest deaths per million, yes. But the next highest number in Latin America are #19 = Brazil and #20 = Chile. Eastern European countries have the highest mortality rate.That trend has been consistent for the past two years. Claiming that Latins are genetically more susceptible to Covid is totally biased bordering on r@cism.