We’re publishing an original essay today by long-standing Daily Sceptic contributor Dr. Sinéad Murphy, a Research Associate in Philosophy at Newcastle University. It’s a response to a Guardian column by Zoe Williams on January 3rd in which she lauded teenagers for their stoical refusal to “bellyache” and “moan” about mask requirements, which Williams regards as no big deal. Dr. Murphy begs to differ. Here is an extract:
Williams opens her article on the subject of bouncing. She recalls her first trip as a professional journalist to interview a talented young skateboarder who was preparing to enter a competition. As she watched his practice session, during which he “smashed” to the ground many times, Williams reports that his mother observed, “He’s 14. They bounce at that age.”
And so Williams establishes her basic position – that young people bounce back, that young people are “resilient”. It is not an original position: in April 2021, when schools reopened for the second time, the headmaster of my boys’ school decorated his written address to parents with bouncing bunnies and excitedly informed us about the “bounce-back curriculum”.
Like so much of Covid messaging – like the line-drawing signs at the doorways of shops and the simple slogans on government podiums – it is all very cute.
But the cuteness belies a blatant disregard for people aged 11 and over whom Williams and her like so casually lump together as ‘teenagers’, to be chuckled at and then dismissed.
Despite opening her article by recalling the first mission of her professional life, Williams admits that she does not recall its subject – not his name, at any rate, nor even whether he won the competition that he was preparing for and that she was reporting on.
There is nothing much in that, perhaps, except that it anticipates what emerges in her article as Williams’s willful blindness to the fact that those between the ages of 11 and 19 are actual individual people, with names…. and faces… and thoughts and feelings and achievements… of their own.
Williams does not regard young people in this way. To her, young people are “teenagers” carelessly massed and explicitly denigrated. Her house, she writes, is “lousy with teenagers”, revealing her opinion that young people are a kind of parasite whose basic needs the rest of us, including their mothers, must resist.
Williams may end her article by lauding the “maturity” of young people but no closing flourish can undo the lack of care evident in her article.
The fact is, Williams experiences young people as barely individuated instances of a general type. What does it matter what their names are? What does it matter what their faces look like? They are little more to her than an abstract concept.
Worth reading in full.
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Explains a lot. This is institutional child abuse. People have been arrested for less…
Savile was knighted and was sought after for marriage advice. His client’s brother frequented on Massad funded sex islands in the Caribbean and in New York.
By jove, I’m spotting a pattern…
“in which she lauded teenagers for their stoical refusal to “bellyache” and “moan” about mask requirements“
Absolutely, we should all look down on those who “bellyache” and “moan” about dictats that they really ought to just put up with in good, obedient spirit.
What does it actually cost someone to sit at the back of the bus, or wear a symbolic badge? Nothing much. People should obviously just obey orders from authority.
Just wear the damn mask/buckle up the damn seatbelt/take the damn injection….
Excellent nanny state stuff from the Guardian, as usual.
The Left regards even their own children primarily as being ‘machines’, as we learnt from Justice Sotomayor a few days ago.
I would love to see this poll question of a cross-section of a nation’s population:
Did you personally know any person under the age of 40 who has died from COVID in the past two years?
This poll question will never be asked, but if it was, and people answered honestly, probably 90 percent would answer “no.”
So the vast majority of the world’s population did not know any person under the median age who died from COVID.
What does this tell us?
Would this have been the case in 1918-1919 of the Spanish Flu?
I doubt it very seriously. Most people would have known several people under 40 who died of the Spanish Flu. In fact, I just read that the average age of a victim of the Spanish Flu was 28. The average age of a victim of COVID in most Western nations is 80 or older.
If you asked did you personally know anyone under the age of 21 who died from COVID, probably 99 percent of world inhabitants would answer “No.”
Why did we turn the world upside down when hardly anyone knows any person middle age or younger who has died from this “dreaded” disease?
Typical modern lefty. Loved the lockdowns. Her kids were no doubt all baking banana bread in between playing out in their nice garden while the poor were going round the twist in their tiny inner city flats. Easy to say kids are resilient when they have a piss easy middle class upbringing.
After working in a modern lefty environment for 8 years ( UK university) after spending 25 years working as a CNC machinist in a factory I found the modern lefty to be just awful. They say they are all for supporting those worse of than themselves but they will turn at the drop of a hat
Bounce Back Better.
It has to be laid bare, the sacrifice of the innocents. Only in such stark relief can we be forced to confront this malign influence. And of course there are even more serious interventions – the ministrations of Mr Spike. His name will not be in the shadows for much longer.Intelligent teenagers aren’t any different from adults this information has spread.
Zoe Williams lauds those who just got on the Train east to their new Jewish home outside Germany.
Bounce back from that one if you can.
eh?
Good old Zoe Williams. In a 2011 article on the London Riots she attached the sobriquet ‘Rat Lady’ to a poor shop keeper who had the temerity to refer to the yobs who ransacked her baby-wear shop as ‘feral youths’. Another example of her callous disregard for the suffering of individuals. Since then I always think of Zoe Williams as ‘that Rat Lady’.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/10/uk-riots-vigilantism-big-society
She’s and many of her ilk, are deluded if they think kids are going to just “bounce back”! Just shows how bloody blinkered and accepting of the narrative they are. Well, in my experience children ARE showing a degree of maturity when many of them come up to us at events to ask questions, because they now know they’re being manipulated and lied to!
I would have thought the skateboarding mum was referring to her sons ability to carry on after a nasty fall, not his psychological ability to survive pointless mandates.
The youngsters who do work their way through the horror they have been forced to endure and understand what is happening and what is coming will be far from the future compliant slaves TPTB desire.
I don’t really understand what happened to the Scottish. Maybe it’s Celtic enrapture to a great leader. But if that’s your fucking masot then you really do live in an age of diminished expectations.Snap out of it.
I have just come back from two days in Scotland, principally Edinburgh, the compliance was utterly depressing.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/11/the-people-who-brutalized-children-to-grab-emergency-powers-are-not-experts-theyre-evil/
Critically assess what’s said by an authority figure or a person wearing a uniform? Mustn’t have that!
And to go off only slightly on a tangent, I thought this opinion poll from France about reaction to Emmanuel Macron saying he wanted to drag “vaccine” resisters “in the shit” was interesting.
60% thought he was “wrong” or “very wrong”; 40% thought he was “right” or “very right”. (There are no “don’t knows” or “won’t says” in these or the following figures.)
Among the vaccinated, the figures were 56% and 44%.
It’s only when you get to those who have been “boosted” that the majority are favourable: 49%-51%.
Among those who describe themselves as supporters of a political party or grouping, the only section favourable to Macron’s statement are those who sympathise with “Ensemble Citoyens”, his own alliance.
BUT…
when asked whether they were in favour of putting restrictions on the “unvaccinated” to encourage them to get “vaccinated”, 60% were in favour.
Clearly there is an element of “It’s not what Macron does; it’s the way that he does it“.
The question is…can such an incumbent win an election?
Macron news
1) Daily Mail: “Brigitte Macron ‘received anonymous phone call saying her husband was with a gay lover’, French documentary claims”
They’re saying that whoever did it used the resources of an intelligence agency.
2) The Times are having a laugh. Macron is apparently in a “pole position”:
“Macron has pole position — but that’s no guarantee of French election success”
Soon the identity of the other man present when the “pole” was engaged will be revealed.
Guess what – Macron may not even run for re-election.
And I thought Macron wanted to shit in their general direction…
Well, let’s have a picture of Zoe Williams of The Guardian!
“When my father died, he left a stack of oral morphine by his bed, and my brothers, sisters and I all took it to see if we would get high. We didn’t. “Maybe it only works if you’re actually in pain,” I said. My sister replied: “I am in pain! My dad just died.” And we all laughed for a really long time.”
Zoe Williams
Below: Zoe in her trendy cannabis outfit.
Don’t have nightmares.
The correct quotation – my emphasis.
When my father died, he left a stack of oral morphine by his bed, and my brothers, sisters and I all took it to see if we would get high. We didn’t. “Maybe it only works if you’re actually in pain,” I said. My sister replied: “I am in pain! My dad just died.” And we all laughed for a really long time, so maybe we were a little high.
I don’t know if you have ever lost someone close to you but semi-hysterical irrational laughter is quite a common response even if you are not high.
What’s known as “a bit of a sinner.”
Williams’s willful blindness to the fact that those between the ages of 11 and 19 are actual individual people, with names…. and faces… and thoughts and feelings and achievements… of their own.
…….
Williams replays a conceit of the Left, which likes to render concrete realities into abstractions, to be designated by big concepts, arranged by big theories and administered by big policies, with little compassion for actual individuals.
It looks like generalisations are a bad thing when applied to teenagers but OK when applied to the left. Actually of course you can’t really make any useful statement about a group of people without some kind of generalisation.
Williams writes for the guardian – that’s all you need to know.
Welcome to the tyrannical ‘vaccine’ culture, organised by AI, and loved by The Guardian cult. Being human, and a rebellious teenager, is so 20th century…
I run the debating society at my school. This afternoon I had to endure the pathetic spectacle of a group of highly motived and enthusiastic 16 year olds debating their motion wearing crisis props on their faces, struggling to hear each other’s muffled points, and occasionally pulling them away from their mouth so they could breathe properly; they had had them on constantly for seven hours.
Zoe Williams
The wearing of these scientifically ridiculous and dehumanising props has been internalised by children across the world who now think that following orders, no matter how nonsensical, is the right thing to do.
So yes. Zoe Williams is asking us to look the other way while children are abused, demeaned, poisoned and brainwashed ready to join her sterile fuckwitted dystopian cuckoo land where facts don’t matter as long as everyone is appeasing their new corporate gods and brain dead communitarianism.
Excellent work CG.
I’m pretty sure that kid couldn’t remember who she was, or give a shit. You reap what you sow.
They get in everywhere if you let them and poison everything. I remember in 1983 this force was chasing me and I spent my teen years and twenties fighting the fucker. You can call him Wendigo or whatever but this is a spiritual force and you should just fight it regardless. My first experience in England was being held down on a bed and being injected with something and I struggles but they got it in anyway.
There really is no point replying to Guardian articles; it just indicates more respect than they deserve. Leave the sewer of the world’s press where it belongs (alongside Bozo and the fake Conservatives) – in the gutter.
Patronizing is the typical attitude of these people towards everyone, not just towards so-called teenagers.
It’s a different world for me. That parents would suggest it and children would adhere to it. I remember my teachers in Belfast and some of them loaded their canes with lead Which was fine. You fucked up and you paid for it. If there is any meaningful political struggle in the decades to come it will be the struggle against centralisation.
Children bounce back, it’s true.
But that doesn’t make it okay to beat them up for no reason.
It’s a joke a population of bloated baby boomers thinking that they control the minds of the young. It isn’t like that at all just wait and see. You can call them fucked up kids but they see more clearly than anyone.
Reasons not to cover faces
A random 10 minute search on Google will throw up a dozen reasons why covering faces is not progress. It seems that eye contact and communication by facial expression go to the very heart of what it is to be human. Therefore anything that prevents that for no good reason should be avoided. I would go further and say that for very good common sense reasons the following are not encouraged in most civilised but particularly British society. It just not the way we have done things, at least in the old normal. Basically in our very open culture there is an expectation that people can see each other’s faces.
* Wearing a motor cycle helmet in a bank, or petrol station – threatening
* Carrying on a conversation while wearing sunglasses – just plain rude
* Wearing a mask when entering someone’s house – a good indicator until very recently and maybe still that you are a burglar,
* Wearing a scarf over your face when going on a protest march – sure sign of extremist group membership and that you are up to no good
* And more recently, wearing a surgical mask which provides no protection from virus transmission.
For all of these reasons I believe that facial covering of any kind should be banned unless there is a good reason for it. I certainly will not engage with anyone whose face I cannot see if they are wearing a full face helmet, sunglasses, or a face mask. It is offensive and not British. To be be able to see someone’s face while interacting with them is part of what it is to be human being and stretches back into the mists of our evolutionary and social development. To cover faces deliberately and for no good reason denies that fundamental humanity. I was in a hospital not long ago. Masks were mandatory and I didn’t want to get into any confrontations so I complied. I was wearing a baseball cap with the peak pulled down, as it was raining outside. I caught a glimpse of myself in a darkened internal office window. I looked very threatening, and certainly unrecognisable. Mask wearing is not progress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGXlTth6rro
My anxiety over the last couple years reminded me of something. That is how I felt through my childhood. In both cases it was due to a lack of control over my life.
Children don’t have a lot of control over their lives and that alone is stressful. They’re the worst affected by this entirely political covid nonsense which reduces their control much more.
MSM is trying to make fun of people wanting to protect themselves with cheap and proven drugs. Ivermectin has been FDA approved for human use since 1996. It also beats Pfizer’s new wonder drug hands down, and costs next to nothing. Ivermectin doesn’t make tons of money. So they know the Covid shot is on its final gasp, so they take it add something different to it, rebrand under another name and charge 20 times what they would for ivermectin. I cannot wrap my head around this nonsense. When I explain this to my relatives they label me as crazy and ask me if I know better than science. I don’t make up these information out of my ass. All this information is true and proven. For some people it is near impossible for them to wake up. They are comfortable in their clown world life. If you want to get Ivermectin you can visit https://ivmpharmacy.com
While in general, the assertion that children are resilient may arguably be true, and that adversity can “toughen them up”, the nature of what is being required of them here is depriving them of the tools needed for developing resilience. And pretty much deliberately so, viz. the Bob Moran cartoon – “Mummy, I’m frightened . . . That’s the spirit!”
Zoe Williams!!
What on earth do people expect?
Dr Murphy mentions examples of fit and healthy athletes collapsing.
To this I would add that in the last couple of months I’ve read about 3 premiership football matches being delayed due to “a medical emergency in the crowd”. I don’t read a huge number of match reports, but prior to last Autumn I can’t recall ever having read about a match being delayed for this reason.
Are more football fans having medical emergencies than a year ago? If so what possible explanation could there be other than covid vaccines?