I was listening to the latest news report that 2021-2022 was the worst year ever for fraud victims in the U.K. – losing £1.3 billion, with the number of incidents increasing by 27% from the year before.
I suspect that even this figure is a significant underestimate because of the reluctance of many to admit and report it. Businesses, relationships and livelihoods can be ruined and, for some, recovery may be impossible. I listen to news with a large tablespoonful of salt but this report actually seems wholly credible.
If there is one thing that the last couple of years has taught me, it is that the public have become poor at risk evaluation, too lazy to question decisions that have the potential to be life-changing for them, too trusting and generally complacent in analytical and critical thinking.
A recent Daily Sceptic article by Professor James Alexander outlines his grand theory that the current three active bodies in contemporary political civilisation are populism, wokeism and liberalism. The following are Collins English Dictionary definitions of each. Populism “refers to political activities or ideas that claim to promote the interests and opinions of ordinary people”. Wokeism: “Behaviour and attitudes of people who are sensitive to social and political injustice.”
It seems to me populism and wokeism are driven more by feelings and subjective theory rather than logic, shrewd experience and pragmatism. The third, liberalism, is defined as “belief in gradual social progress by changing laws rather than by revolution”. But the Collins definition of revolution is “a successful attempt by a large group of people to change the political system of their country by force”. So there now appears to be more of the population sensitive to injustice, wishing to promote a social empathy via liberalism. This only highlights the further illusion of societal progression because it is actually a small group of powerful elite that are fuelling this ‘revolution’ or, as I prefer to call it, fraud – a moral and intellectual equivalent of the £1.3 billion lost this last year.
The £1.3 billion lost to the public in scams is only based on personal financial transactions mostly involving their bank accounts. The more sceptical among us would include the billions lost and wasted in Government Covid measures (a staggering £400 billion), Net-Zero targets (a mind-boggling £1.4 trillion by 2050) and the trillions of pounds lost through quantitative-easing generated inflation.
How can the public be protected from the sort of fraud they have endured over the last few years? How can we improve risk evaluation and keep our guard? What might make people realise that liberalism, populism and wokeism deny us an essential acute perception of reality and lead us into a dark tunnel of vanishing liberty and diminishing functional security?
It should start in schools, reacquainting children with the virtues of freedom of speech and inquiry. We need to find a way to teach children not just Maths and English but Scepticism – the subject that will safeguard their future social, health and economic prospects by not allowing them to be beholden to the State.
Classes in Sceptical Thinking could put forward motions allowing the pupils to select topics for debating what the Government and others in public life claim and propose and whether the claim is true or the intended action is fair and proportionate. For instance, a topic might be: “Are you hearing just one side of the argument for mass Covid vaccination and not the other side in the media?’ One half of the class puts the case that all viewpoints are being fully aired (stop laughing at the back!), or perhaps that they are not but the media are right to conceal information. The other half would put the case that the public are not getting a full picture, are being prevented from receiving a balanced argument for valid informed consent and that this is fundamentally wrong. In so doing, students would need to develop and exercise critical and analytical thinking in supplying evidence to support their arguments.
This type of freedom of speech appears to be missing these days in the classroom, with pupils being brainwashed into accepting so-called Government approved expert advice or diktats. The return of proper rigorous debate as a core educational subject, on a par with English and Maths, would encourage the whole class to consider things more openly and honestly and in a way that has hitherto been sidelined or completely removed. It would equip pupils with the tools, not only to claim their stake in democracy, but to own it.
At the very least, it would mean more children would grow up asking: “What are our schools and politicians hiding from us? Are we being scammed?”
Dr. Mark Shaw is a retired dentist.
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.
excellent idea. The basis should be the return of formal debating in which people have to propose motions with which they may disagree and the result judged dispassionately, not by a vote on the floor but by teachers marking the structure of the arguments. Not easy I know but it’s a great challenge.
Teachers marking? I assume you haven’t met many teachers!
Are teachers the ‘professionals’ for whom the Education Secretary is seeking a 9% pay rise? Those lily livered pond life who were happily complicit in denying a proper education to our children, driven by their unions who are now threatening to strike?
They need to have their salaries reduced, not enhanced and their right to strike withdrawn.
Unprincipled bastards
It’s going to be a bit of an effort when you get the full idea of what TEACHERS think the kids should be taught.
Appalling must watch video from an Irish teaching union
https://twitter.com/FatEmperor/status/1542463974117183488
With thanks to Ivor Cummins
I hesitated to click on this because I knew it would infuriate me, but I did. Unbelievable.
When I was 7 or 8 I identified as a boy. I worse boys clothes, had a boys hair cut, climbed trees and skinned my knees and even belonged to the local cub group because it was run by my mother and it was more convenient for her to take me with her. I despised brownies as sissies. Guess what? I was a tomboy, and like most other tomboys I grew out of it at puberty. God knows what would have happened to me these days! Come to think of it, tomboy is a word you don’t hear now either. (Probably deemed offensive or something)
Years ago, before I mistrusted the BBC, the author Val McDermid, (who I dislike due to her stance on Independence, masks, vaccines etc), made this point beautifully……basically, as a girl she was a tomboy, preferring football and traditional “boy” pursuits. She later found herself attracted to her own sex and has always been in lesbian rather than heterosexual relationships.
AT NO POINT EVER felt that those childhood traits or sexual preferences signified she was the “wrong” gender, simply it was appropriate for boys OR girls to participate in those activities and sexual choices.
In other words; if a female can do ANYTHING she wishes to do as a female, and a man can do the same, where is the validity in the argument “I was born the wrong gender”?
It’s too subtle for the Trans brigade, who would simply and wrongly see @the old bat or Val McDermid climbing their respective trees as children and say, “Oh, look at that poor boy born into a girl’s body, better get that sorted out for them”
One of the most egregious things I’ve recently seen is also in this video. That’s the picture of this amorphous creature whose text says
I was born with the body of a boy but the brain of a girl.
Math is hard, let’s go shopping! anyone? If that’s not sexist, I don’t know what is. I’ve been socialised in the 1980s, ie, well before all these all men/ all women cliches were reintroduced (early 2000s in Germany) and shit like this makes my blood boil. By that time, we decidedly didn’t think it was chic to regard the often cited 50% of mankind as of the lower orders because of the sex difference and I refuse to start doing so just because this would be politically convenient for some people.
There’s a great episode of Little House on the Prairie, where the father, Charles Ingolls, wants to take Laura, his middle daughter, on a hunting expedition. His wife objects, saying it isn’t right for girls to do such things. Charles rejects her idea, stating that he’s sure she’ll grow into a wonderful woman. They go, and Laura saves the day when Charles injures himself, miles from anywhere, with his own gun.
Obviously, these episodes were aired before the Woke Brigade got their teeth into everything.
These watermelon-shaped beings are very strange. What planet to they live on?
This is also very scary
wwwDOTyoutubeDOTcom/watch?v=XA07ta2tJpQ
Neither politicians nor large employers are interested in people able to and courageous enough to engage in sceptical thinking.
The whole point of children’s education now is to turn them into semi-skilled obedient sheep who know their place and keep their mouths shut.
“The whole point of children’s education now is to turn them into semi-skilled obedient sheep who know their place and keep their mouths shut.”
Bang on the nail but the people pushing this are the Davos Deviants. The politicians are just under orders.
The DD’s want a wholly compliant and sheep-like populace because they require SLAVES not sentient, questioning human beings.
I fear some people have yet to perceive the depth of evil being planned – depopulation and enslavement for the survivors. Some run of the mill civil servants and politicians might be given a small sincere, a kapo type position while they have a use, but after that they will be off to the knackers yard.
Apologies – bloody predictive- – ‘sincere’ was of course sinecure.
Take ’em out and teach them at home.
Education is now massively politicised
Health the same.
Best avoid schools. And the NHS.
The problem is certainly one of trusting in authority/the state. In 2003, unlike many sensible British people, I swallowed the WMD nonsense just because I did not believe a government would tell such blatant lies – truth was finally turned on its head in with the Hutton report. Obviously Gilligan told the truth and Blair lied over Dr Kelly and Hutton used technical technical arguments to twist the results – the Chairman and Director General resigned and the BBC was captured, and by degrees most of the mainstream have been swallowed up since. I guess by now the lies are so all enveloping and pervasive that it is simply easier to give up. I suppose it is the first circle of the metaverse.
Hallelujah! What a brilliant sensible idea. Some here may well have seen the attached feature extracted from The Light newspaper issue 21 p23. The kids are the future of the human race, god help us all if free / critical thinking gets completely wiped out.
They taught us some complete twaddle at school – things that turned out to just not be true at all.
The biggest whopper I can think of was this notion that we “the people” are governed by consent and that we have inalienable rights (granted to us by “God”).
It turns out we don’t and that these “rights” are granted to us by the government who can take them away from us whenever they feel like it (“for the greater good”) – even for the most stupidest reasons (like because someone decided to rebrand the flu for example)
It also turns out that the government basically owns our kids because we were stupid enough to “register” them with the government.
I’m dreading my daughters going to school. I suppose I’ll have to try and teach them that many of the pointless things they are learning are “just pretend” and that they should “just write the answers the teacher wants regardless of if they are actually true or not”. I’d encourage them to not believe anything school tells them unless they can prove it themselves. BUT they must never let on to the school that they are doing this.