The pandemic has seen unprecedented infringements in our civil liberties. Policies that would have been regarded with suspicion or even outrage if implemented by Britain’s ‘enemies’ – like confining people in their homes – have been par for the course.
Interestingly, in both Britain and the United States, support for lockdown measures has been greater on the political left, even though right-wing voters tend to be older (and hence at greater risk from Covid).
In a paper published this July, researchers found that Labour and SNP voters were much more likely than Conservatives to support closing schools and shops, and making people stay at home. Likewise, Democrat voters in the U.S. have been more supportive of lockdowns than Republicans.
There are several factors behind the left’s enthusiasm for lockdowns: skewed risk perceptions; the ideology of safetyism; a preference for prioritising health over the economy (including ‘our NHS’). However, one reason that hasn’t received much attention is the growing strain of left-wing authoritarianism.
In a paper published last December, Joseph Manson explored the influence of left and right-wing authoritarianism on people’s attitudes to lockdowns and other restrictions. ‘Right-wing authoritarianism’ is a well-known construct in psychology, but ‘left-wing authoritarianism’ is relatively new.
The latter phenomenon had not received much attention in psychology until recently, most likely because of the discipline’s left-wing skew.
Right-wing authoritarianism is measured via agreement with items such as, “What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader,” and “God’s laws about abortion, pornography and marriage must be strictly followed”.
By contrast, left-wing authoritarianism is measured via agreement with items such as, “This country would work a lot better if certain groups of Christian troublemakers would just shut up and accept their group’s proper place in society.”
Manson found that both of these constructs were positively associated with support for lockdowns and other restrictions. Those who scored high on right-wing authoritarianism were particularly likely to say that foreigners should be banned from entering the country.
Those who scored high on left-wing authoritarianism were particularly likely to say that governments should have the power to prohibit misinformation, and that politicians should be able to introduce new restrictions without consulting legislative bodies.
There were also areas of agreement. As Manson notes, both right and left-wing authoritarians favoured “restrictions on the right to protest, punishment without the right to trial by jury, and surveillance via a mandatory tracking app”.
Regardless of one’s view on the pandemic restrictions, there can be no doubt that many of them have an authoritarian character. And even if their impact in the short run was positive (something of which I am doubtful), the possibility that they will be misused by governments in the future remains troubling.
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An interesting interview of Kingsnorth by Sayers, about this piece:
Paul Kingsnorth: why I changed sides in the vaccine wars
Interesting conversation between two panickers, one of whom (Sayers) seems still broadly in the panicker camp, the other (Kingsnorth) who has seen where the panicker route inevitably leads, doesn’t like it, and is shifting his ground a bit as a result. Credit to him for that, but he’s a day late and a dollar short. The things Kingsnorth is saying are his reasons for shifting, that he “never expected to see” when he meekly submitted to the “emergency” fear propaganda and obeyed every instruction for fear of being a “bad person”, are exactly what the sceptical side warned about at the time.
It’s interesting that he refers to the threats to free speech in the big tech censorship that has been imposed to protect the panicker agenda, of which he says: “It’s a little bit like the ongoing conversation about free speech, which we all thought was settled, and then turned out really not to be”.
People on the other side of the culture wars from him have known for a long time that free speech was dying in our culture. We saw the way “racism” and “sexism” and “homophobia” etc were all censored and punished after being redefined as “hate speech” or as “offensive”, rather than what they were – dissenting speech. We saw the creation of the attitudes and institutions that were used to suppress resistance to the covid panic, and pointed out the dangers. But the left (for it was they) hypocritically ignored their own claimed aphorisms about “everyone free or nobody free” and “first they came for…” and “I might hate what you say…” etc, and blithely accepted the censorship and harassment of what they saw as bad people saying bad things, or rationalised it as being for the greater good. Now some of them, like Kingsnorth, are waking up to the consequences, but still trying to evade their own responsibility for supporting the roots of those consequences.
What’s missing in this discussion is any recognition that this is not a matter of two equal sides arguing over a misunderstanding and if only they’d stop hating each other we could all meet in the middle.
With regard to the covid panic, both Sayers and Kingsnorth basically agree that clearly there is a medical emergency with covid and the decent thing to do was obviously to go along with the protective measures. Kingsnorth even basically agreed with Sayers’ outrageous suggestion at 25:08 that non-panickers’ views were fundamentally “rejecting the whole rational-only view of the world”. But the hard reality is that at the societal level, covid has never been anything significantly different from the kinds of colds and flu’s we have always had, albeit in pandemic form in this case. It was never going to kill huge numbers (1918 flu numbers, for instance) of people, or devastate societies. At the very worst (utterly unrealistic) case, it might mean healthcare became very busy for a while (“overwhelmed”). We already knew that, with the first numbers we saw, before the UK lockdown at the end of March, and certainly there was no excuse for still believing in the “emergency” fairy story by a couple of months later.
So the panickers did not “have a point”. They were objectively and demonstrably wrong. The panic measures were in no sense ever going to approach being cost effective even just in monetary terms, without taking account of all the other social, cultural and political costs that Kingsnorth at least is waking up to. And, contra Sayers, cost-effectiveness and a proper cost/benefit analysis is the sine qua non of a rational approach to the world. As so often, the leftist, radical, elite-serving side of the culture wars (in this case the panickers) accuse the other side of what they themselves are guilty of.
Kingsnorth and Sayers are both objectively wrong in approving the panic response to covid. They are against the science on this, and duped by establishment Official Truth “science”.
In wider terms, the culture wars are almost invariably not a case of two basically morally equal sides, as Kingsnorth presents it. They are a matter of, on one side aggressors (the radical left, broadly, by definition) forcing radical change on people, and on the other, people trying to defend themselves and their culture and communities against it. And then the radicals call out the defenders as “fomenting a culture war”.
At 24:50 Kingsnorth points out that: “real societies are held together by a sense of social norms. And we haven’t got them any more.” Absolutely, Kingsnorth. And who was it who has at every stage sought to undermine and destroy (“reform”) those social norms, and the institutions and cultural icons that supported them, because they were raci
At 24:50 Kingsnorth points out that: “real societies are held together by a sense of social norms. And we haven’t got them any more.” Absolutely, Kingsnorth. And who was it who has at every stage sought to undermine and destroy (“reform”) those social norms, and the institutions and cultural icons that supported them, because they were racist, or nationalist, or sexist, or homophobic, or monarchist, or Christian, or just old fashioned….? Thus was the culture war initiated and waged, over the past century and more at least.
Judge Blocks Biden’s COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate for Federal Contractors
https://www.theepochtimes.com/judge-blocks-bidens-covid-19-vaccine-mandate-for-federal-contractors_4131618.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_medium=email2&utm_campaign=breaking-2021-11-30-4&est=sKLZ%2FjICvYEwzdYFI%2F%2FBplK7SJkYtDqucNfDL4k58nTes6XS%2BIV17SFn%2BOgp8oMOX7dv
The ruling applies to three states
By Zachary Stieber
Stand in the Park Sundays from 10am – make friends & keep sane
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Join our Telegram Group and have some fun http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
I’ve never been a huge fan of Unherd – it just looks too slick, well lit and Freddie is just a bit too charming. Contrast it to the pandemic podcast – now that guy looks like he filming in his back bedroom in daylight and whereas Freddie looks unruffled and smooth, Dan looks like he is as stressed as the rest of us at times.
I certainly see your point. In a time when our own elites are gaslighting and tyrannising us it’s easy to be suspicious of anything looking too comfortable!
Unherd certainly seems to have had some money behind it, but I was quite hopeful for Unherd and Sayers when they first emerged at the beginning of the lockdown. They seemed genuinely open minded and to be presenting some genuinely dissident stuff. But Sayers certainly let us all down, and went over to the dark side. I think it was during the panickers’ winter offensive last year, when so many of the weak sisters of the resistance fell into line.
Fees per administered jab up 20%
https://www.hsj.co.uk/primary-care/vax-fee-to-general-practice-increased-as-government-sets-huge-target/7031439.article
“Vote for your favourite Political Cartoon and Covid Cartoon here: https://ellwoodatfield.com/political-cartoon-of-the-year-awards-2021/”
Struggled to find much there of merit, though Bob’s entries were good, I thought. A few others ok, but the “political cartoons” section felt like a flashback to the 1990s – a tedious selection of right on sanctimony.
ITEM: “Dan Andrews’ divisive pandemic bill is set to become law after debate” – Daniel Andrews’ controversial pandemic legislation is set to become law following marathon debate in Parliament’s Upper House, giving the Premier unprecedented powers, reports Australian Associated Press.
It was so close. After former Labor MP, Adem Somyurek, returned to parliament (jabbed but previously refusing to play the show your papers game) to strangle the vote in the Legislative Council (Victoria’s upper house), Andrews and his Health Minister (the putative duumvirate in all matters pandemic) deferred the vote until they could hit the phones to find a Judas Iscariot from the anti-Bill independents on the crossbench.
And Independent, Rodney Barton, duly stepped up to the plate. He flipped after wangling a handful of cosmetic amendments. These include a joint parliamentary committee (with government members in the minority) to oversee public health orders. That Andrews was happy to concede this shows that he fully expects this body be a rubber-stamp operation as they will be chosen from the parliamentary club which has done zilch to reign in Andrews at any stage whilst any of their ‘disallowance’ recommendations will have to vault two hurdles by being agreed to by both houses of parliament (and Labor has a fat minority in the lower house), and would, if they did pass this test, be diluted by further meaningless concessions to idiot crossbenchers.
These are the sort of procedural shenanigans that give the appearance of robust ‘checks and balances’ – but which fundamentally do not change the thrust of Andrews’ power-grab because the Premier can still declare a pandemic at will and dictate the response to it (and we know where his predilection lies there – Robocops, pepper-spray, Armoured Personnel Carriers, etc).
Barton’s backflip does mean, however, that prison (up to two years) for an “aggravated offence” against breaches of restrictions is now history but the fines remain ($21,909 for not wearing a mask, breaking a prescribed movement limit, attending an illegal protest or a gathering, refusing to get tested or failing to show ID; $90,870 for going to work when infectious; $109,044 for businesses failing to make sure customers QR code for check-in, etc.).
The professional and amateur civil liberties and human rights outfits which have been mute during the whole Dan Dictatorship (they are woke lefty/liberal bodies who basically agree with Andrews’ premise that ‘It is not about human rights. It is about human life’) did find partial voice over the draft legislation, but have welcomed the passage of the amended bill. and gone back to beddie-byes.
“ breaking a prescribed movement limit, attending an illegal protest or a gathering, refusing to get tested or failing to show ID”
It’s not a law because it’s an outrageous abuse of our political system. No man, woman or child must obey this law at any time. It’s total resistance now, or they’ll totally break you later. Dan Andrews is a monstrous tyrant who has committed crimes against humanity and people have an ethical obligation to ignore this act.
Last para. of other post.
Dan Andrews does not get to decide if a protest is illegal or not. He also does not get to out “movement limits” on human beings in free countries. He is monstrous. One of the worst abusers of rights in the Anglosphere. A tyrant.
“The professional and amateur civil liberties and human rights outfits which have been mute during the whole Dan Dictatorship (they are woke lefty/liberal bodies who basically agree with Andrews’ premise that ‘It is not about human rights. It is about human life’) did find partial voice over the draft legislation, but have welcomed the passage of the amended bill. and gone back to beddie-byes.“
Sounds like they are the equivalent of bodies like Liberty here – basically designed to legitimise woke tyranny by providing the superficial appearance of policing it whilst actually ensuring it is enabled for use against the elite’s preferred targets.
A good lesson for the tyrants who rule us, is to learn that they rule with the consent of the governed. The Johnson government, along with many others in the formerly “Free West”, broke the 400 year-old social contract that makes our societies work, because a bunch of pinhead gimps like Neil Ferguson thought they could abuse us like the CCP does in China. Now they have learnt we are not Chinese. We do not consent to this outrageous abuse of our system. We defy the government because it has crossed an important line.
The dreadful thing is that tyrants throughout the ‘free’ world have learned that most of the imbecile governed are quite happy to consent to outrageous tyranny.
And vote for Bob Moran at the above link if you can!!!
The Telegraph disgraced itself by kowtowing to an unhinged woman on Twitter demanding that he be sacked.
Quite. Nothing we have done has worked. A very hubristic generation has just had its arse handed to it by something so small you can’t even see it.
Given what is going on we need to be asking our MPs why Dr Carl Heneghan at the Centre for Evidence Based medicine has not been commissioned by government to gather the evidence necessary to validate the continued use of interventions.
We need somebody outside the bubble to do the work and report on what is actually happening.
But most importantly it is a reasonable request, and refusal to do so will tell us all we need to know about what is going on.
As someone posted the other day
“Policy-based evidence-making” has replaced the traditional “evidence-based policy-making”.
But then we already know – and have done for many months!
I’m really over all this crap about covid daily headlines on, is it or isn’t it, this or that, not one article on the truth of the matter. Covid is no more dangerous than the flu! Just live your life & tell the politicians to jog on.
None of these so-called “experts” will let go voluntarily, they are like career generals with a once in a lifetime chance to start a war, they’ve spent their entire career masturbating over the fantasy of having a crisis to heroically solve, they are all charlatans.
As for the monarchy, the queen is dead, we just have to wait for her to die & be replaced by a transgender princess. The only shocking thing about the monarchy is it still exists in the 21st century. It’ll probably be listed on the FTSE 100 as The Firm.corp by a gay prince, willy. I would apologize for offending any royalists, but I’m not sorry, so I won’t.
Well, since all the royals nowadays spend their time offending royalists ………… !!!!
LOL
German government to vote on compulsory vaccines.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/11/30/now-germany-proposes-mandatory-covid-vaccinations/
From the article:
Maybe those that have changed their mind are waiting for the vaccine or the figures are wrong.
Surely they must realise the optics of this are not good, right? Even if they can wrangle it as ‘for public health’ surely there must be a lightbulb in the back of their mind SOMEWHERE.
I realize that I am becoming less inclined to engage with a lot of the topics that appear here. With, perhaps, the exception of hard data.
That’s not criticism – far from it. But a reflection on the fact that most has now been said, with little impact on the mass of the population. Each new and egregious invasion of civil and human rights (as outlined in Silkie Carlo’s Telegraph article) is an illustration of the increased ineffectiveness of rationality and argument. The current ramping up of absurdity and denial of reality across Europe simply underlines that the elite has got away with it, and now feels totally unconstrained. The latest mask mandate – a contradiction of all that is known, and the flagrant mythology around the latest scarient is proof positive of the confidence with which the population can be treated as serfs.
Sounds defeatist?
Perhaps – but despite some hopeful conversations showing a degree of scepticism, I don’t feel optimistic about overturning the new dictatorship any time soon.
I reached this point about half a year ago – just reading the same discussions again and again, the same debates on TalkRadio, round and round we go! Chasing our tails. Meanwhile the insanity continues apace as if we’ve learned nothing. Reality continues to shift further away. The world we knew is not just in the rear-view mirror anymore, it’s over the hill and gone. The only solution is to ignore everything and not participate for the rest of our lives, hoping that common sense will return.
Yes – and we all experience the increasing preponderance of what is essentially just repetition in the comments here as the assault on rationality continues..
“Gun control is dead, and it was killed by the leftists and the media. They killed it by pushing riots as protests and pushing the defunding and the demoralisation of law enforcement. All that’s left is the Second Amendment, and it’s dawning on everyone, like a giant red nuclear pill that was detonated over America, that the only thing between you and anarchy is self-protection”
‘The Five’: Black Friday more like Glock Friday
Nice one by Bob Moran, CONMEN, how true.. Anyone else think the latest booster hysteria is to boost the figures for the Segregation passport?
The latest week’s ONS data on deaths in England & Wales has been published. Here are the graphs that I’m tracking (below). All four graphs are running at their highest level in 23 months.
The “< 1 Year Old” graph is a crude proxy for stillbirths, because it also includes infants who died before they reached the age of 12 months. I have sent a Freedom of Information (FOI) request through to the ONS to get the data on stillbirths, because they only provide data up until 2019, and not the last two years. They’ll come back to me in the next couple of weeks, hopefully with the raw stillbirths data.
I have selected Males and not Females, and only in the age bands from 20-35, because:
These are all cause deaths? That <1 year old graph looks a little alarming!
“anecdotal evidence is that these vaccines are affecting boys and young men more so than woman (we’ve all noticed the number of professional footballers collapsing on the pitch“
Indeed, though not always men, obviously. DM front page atm:
Scotland women’s international rugby player Siobhan Cattigan who campaigned against sexism in the sport has died suddenly at the age of 26
#diedsuddenly …. “non-suspicious“….”cause of death is unclear“
Had to call a washing machine engineer today and had countless texts and e-mails telling me to keep a 2 metre distance and keep the door open.
Thankfully the engineer was in agreement with me.
“F×CK THAT FOR A GAME OF SOLDIERS!!!”
This is not about health it’s about the impostion of a global tyranny on the back of a manufactured medical emergency .. it’s about global Chinafication
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLTuS6tke4344WQD-vbvUTg
Please share far and wide this video needs to go viral
NO to digital medical passes .. Do NOT Consent .. Do NOT comply