Back in April, the Free Speech Union put together a spoof April Fools’ Day news article about how the Daily Sceptic was looking to recruit a team of sensitivity readers to, as we put it, help the editorial team create a “safe online space from which those with distasteful views can be excluded”, and be responsible for “developing untapped issues in the field of sensitivity (e.g., ‘Are verbs racist?’, ‘Is proper grammar fascism by other means?’, ‘Do linear narratives perpetuate colonial thought structures?’, etc) and bringing these to the attention of the editors”.
Even at the time, we were getting perilously close to the point at which satire might plausibly cross over into plain reportage. According to Steerpike in the Spectator, however, a particularly earnest group of progressive undergraduates at the University of Cambridge have now contrived to blur that distinction altogether.
This is the news that the legendary Cambridge Footlights, one of Britain’s oldest student comedy troupes, whose alumni include Germaine Greer, Sue Perkins, Stephen Fry, Richard Ayoade, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Clive James and David Mitchell, is now recruiting for a new ‘sensitivity reading’ service to ensure “all student comedy” is as “inclusive as possible” and “to check for potential oversights regarding racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism, or any other kind of sensitive or upsetting material”.
The new “optional request for any student-written comedy” will involve a member of the Footlights Committee offering to vet submissions and conferring with the other members of their panel as to any necessary changes.
A briefing document for members seen by the Spectator stresses that this is “an opt-in service and is not at all compulsory” and promises that “this is not a joke deletion service… we would seek to maintain all the humour and hopefully we’re qualified to do this”.
It also asserts in bold that “this is not censorship”, and that “we are not trying to stop students pushing the boundaries on what is acceptable… we are only offering a second, uninvolved opinion on your work, specifically to check whether it comes across as punching up rather than down”.
Despite these nods to the importance of artistic creativity and freedom of expression, the invocation of the metaphor ‘punching’ up or down does rather suggest the document’s authors may well have other, more progressive priorities.
In the new woke lexicon, to ‘punch down’ is to make fun of any person or group who is in some way deemed to be less ‘privileged’ than the comedian. This, apparently, is the greatest crime a modern comedian can commit.
Of course, many comedians might well argue that what they’re swinging away at during their routines isn’t people, but abstract sets of ideas; not trans folk or Black Lives Matter protesters, for instance, but trans activist ideology and critical race theory.
It’s therefore interesting to consider the extent to which the metaphor of ‘punching’ up or down serves to reframe reality, forcing us to personify humour’s intended targets, and thus render the comedian either as an abuser (i.e., ‘punching down’) or a progressive campaigner (i.e., ‘punching up’).
In that sense, the Footlights Committee’s new sensitivity reading initiative won’t need to involve, as they put it, “joke deletion”, “censorship”, or any direct attempt to “stop students from pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable”, to end up having a chilling effect.
Because what budding young comic among Cambridge’s student body will want to be whispered about among friends and peers as a psychologically abusive, hate-fuelled, minority-victimising bully?
Dr. Frederick Attenborough is the Communications Officer of the Free Speech Union.
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How did we get here?
When every western country did the same things at the same time, when they all gave themselves emergency powers, to do things previously against plans for respiratory virus, then some form of control or orchestration was in play.
“How did we get here?”
“Once in a Lifetime.” Talking Heads.
I couldn’t resist. Apologies for being facetious.
Poignantly, I reckon I’ve missed the window of opportunity to get behind the wheel of a truly large automobile.
Yes. That’s what I was going to point out. My own considered opinion is that the activities of Jeremy Farrar’s CEPI were central to the sudden change in various governments’ approaches.
Although CEPI’s newly crafted plans (with their focus on minimising the immediate impact of the new pathogen during the first 100 days after its emergence, during which time they would develop diagnostics, vaccines and treatment protocols) were aimed at dealing with a much more lethal agent than the relatively innocuous SARS Covid-19, they exaggerated the apparent threat in order to provide a test-bed for their ideas.
Since their overall approach had already been nodded off by the WHO, enormous pressure was then brought to bear on any governments that failed to implement their policies. It’s all documented on the CEPI website (https://100days.cepi.net/100-days-mission-accelerating-diagnostic-test-development-and-deployment-to-prevent-a-future-pandemic/)
Since their overall approach had already been nodded off by the WHO, enormous pressure was then brought to bear on any governments that failed to implement their policies.
Some of that ‘enormous pressure’ proved to be terminal.
That ‘enormous pressure’ will soon become official policy when sovereign nations sign off health policy to an unelected, Gates’ funded, Davos led, global organisation.
https://dailyexpose.uk/2021/12/11/plague-laws-a-global-pandemic-treaty-and-a-new-world-order/
“During the 41st session of the Corona Investigative Committee Dr. Astrid Stuckelberger, a whistle-blower from the WHO, said the rules under which countries work with WHO virtually put WHO in charge of all rules and formal edicts – with Bill Gates unofficially as part of the executive board as if he were a member state.”
We need constantly to question the narrative that being wealthy makes someone a bona fide know all without doing any hard graft of the experts in the field, or being gifted in similar fields with transferable skills or having the extreme flair of the semi-polymath.
Several famous people spring to mind as not being polymaths; Bill Gates is certainly one. And many of those who lay claim to vast areas of expertise due to being loaded have the emotional IQ of a bluebottle..
Ferguson’s ‘then we realised we could’ remark is significant.
What he said was ‘Then we realised we could get away with it.’ A significant difference.
That’s what I meant but yes, you are quite right.
Indeed.
Do we think he was he ‘getting away with’ rolling out life-saving medical care?
Or ‘getting away with’ the massive Covid scam parameters, ‘the public were buying it’, like the pcr test, asymptomatic spread, masks, quaratines, propaganda, falsified data, falisifed studies, illogical inconsistencies, censorship etc?
It would be funnier if it wasn’t so egregiously harmful.
Wait until they destroy our money and try to impose their Digital/ Medical/Green Vax passports!
Check out what Johnson is signing us up to at the Gates ‘owned’ WHO!
I attempted to discuss that with family and they said I read too many conspiracy theories…
I am the only unvaccinated member of the family and have been sceptical from the very beginning. Now some of them are slowly changing their minds but couching it in language that suggests they too were sceptical but that isn’t true. I don’t and won’t forget being ridiculed about things which were true.
Spot on. A comment that justifies piano wire and a lamppost.
I agree and worse than that, he admitted it and a lot of people don’t seem remotely bothered either
So is his remarkable history of failures, and his Gates’ funded employer.
Where is Ferguson? Why has someone not arraigned him, and the remainder of SAGE, on the matter. Sir Chris Whitty has been whittering, seemingly revitalised after his outburst within a month of SAGE being “stood down”. Arraign him!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYIh4MkcfJA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8BkzvP19v4
Social conformity and reduced responsibility are strong motivators to the weak or unaware.
Cowardly and intellectually and morally lazy people who spend their lives replaying and reciting what others tell them, without reflection or consideration of any kind, are a disgrace. They are a disgrace to Life.
Their cowardice and compliance enable tyrants and marginalise those who try to live their lives with honour.
Today, they are the ones who do the tests, wear the masks and take the jabs – not with reluctance as ones compelled, but with a sense of moral superiority; shaking their heads with disapproval at those who do not.
If their children and grandchildren have any hope of a future fit for human beings, it is no thanks to them.
https://ourdecisiontoo.com/Issue/there-s-nothing-left-to-do-but-go-our-separate-ways/320/
Thanks, CA – but no thanks. They piss me off mightily, but I like and love quite a lot of them …
Quite – this article is perseverating once again as if the last two years of clownish deceit never happened. The Toby Young “cock-up” hypothesis has been disproved a million times over – perhaps it serves a useful purpose for debate but beyond any reasonable doubt it was all pre-meditated, part of a global coup d’etat run from the UN, WEF, Gates, Rockefeller, Black Rock etc, etc And the clowns go on cocking it up.
Toby Young is now so far out at sea in his self- deception – “not waving, but drowning” ( Stevie Smith)
But everyone knows all this. I could barely read the article because this rationale has been imprinted on the insides of my eyelids from reading this publication the last couple of years.
But does that mean it was some “cockupspiracy” that governments all around the world all of a sudden decided to implement in lockstep (exactly as the Rockefeller’s Operation Lockstep said they would)? Where did bureaucrats get this simultaneous spontaneous boldness to abandon decades of public health policy?
Oh well, I guess it will all come out in the inquiry. Like the Leveson Inquiry that really cleared everything up. Then it’s “back to normal” and “never again”.
Except you may have noticed that the world is now on a trajectory towards something else. A “war economy” is allowing the government and central banks to remake the world in their image. The money printing and enforced shortages will mean that we’re not going back to normal for a long time, if ever.
I still can’t understand how members of our elite, our Oxford educated journalist class that would go out of their way to found The Daily Sceptic, can be so wilfully blind to the broader agenda. It’s called Agenda 2030 and it’s coming up at warp speed.
Exactly. And as you rightly point out everything that is happening is ‘hidden in plain sight,’ with Rockefeller’s Operation Lockstep and Agenda 2030.
A pointless article which adds nothing to our situation.
Yet another pointless DS article.
I find the absence of contributions from UK Column, The Corbett Report, and The Last American Vagabond particularly telling.
Fully agree, but at least there’s about 20% of us who saw it for what it was/is.
Hopefully that’s enough to stop the bastards.
I still can’t quite understand how practically every country imposed the same restrictions at more or less the same time – with digital ID, sorry, vaccination as the only solution.
Must just be a coincidence.
And never forget they’re still out jabbing kids – to protect them for the greater good. Lol.
https://ourdecisiontoo.com/Issue/there-s-nothing-left-to-do-but-go-our-separate-ways/320/
If it had a name to it, I might have bothered reading it. Anonymously, it’s just more noises off.
We got here because public policy in this country is run by a certain type of bed-wetting, woke, middle class elite. These people have lots of qualifications but virtually zero common sense. They also talk a great game on compassion, caring society etc but in reality that were happy to throw old, frail people under a bus.
Not just this country. It would appear pretty much every country.
And they are in secure, well-paid employment, living in decent houses with gardens and able to afford all the latest shiny toys – and mostly with families so they weren’t alone. They claim empathy, but the way they evangelised for the Covidian Cult showed that in reality it’s only themselves they care about (the ‘work from home’ lark suited them down to the ground!).
They didn’t give a shit about the elderly person in some grotty care home who saw nobody for months. Or the single mother and her kids living in a tower block and having to exist on the dole because the zero-hours contract work she was on had disappeared. Or the isolated single person who ended up self-harming more than ever. Or the many other people who were badly affected by it all.
Yes – none of those policies could have been universally imposed if our press, medical and scientific institutions and journals, regulatory bodies, international bodies and government bureaucracies hadn’t been at least “consolidated” or, perhaps better, “captured.”
You can’t quash all dissent in such a situation without a centralised top-down power structure. And those don’t arise from panicking over the science.
Probably wise to recall the context of when this all started,
against the backdrop of the shenanigans of late 2019 they didn’t have much political choice but follow the herd and go into lockdown.
in hindsight they should have ignored sage but by that time the nhs had already killed many and the headlines where all gloom & doom.
as we saw from December 2021 it’s not all BJ’s decision and he needs to keep his cabinet happy too. So long as cabinet is comprised of wise people we should be ok.
There is an extraordinary amount of fortunate timing for cetain parties isn’t there. Its clear it came from the lab, but on demand or by accident? Its a daunting prospect.
Given how far the Chinese went to deny, lockdown and unsuccessfully contain it covid was Definitely an accident.
They where clearly mucking with something they didn’t understand. Not that the west understand either.
im sure the west have more of a handle on it now than the Chinese.
not sure why they let people have the mRNA jabs though. Clearly it’s flawed.
And the “fortunate timing” continues, with the war in Ukraine diverting attention right at the time when a larger number of people (although by no means a majority) are starting to question the Covidian bollox they’ve been fed for the past two years.
You mean you think this wasn’t all intentional? The Bond-film-like naming of organisations such as Sage / Nervtag / Spi-B? The Bond-esque villain without the white cat – Klaus Schwab? The repurposing of flu / cold to stand in for frightening viruses? The vaccines for kebabs / for vouchers to brothels? The never ever wanting there to be good news? The lockstep / goose step synchronicity of their decisions? The sudden end of the pandem- whatever and it’s replacement with a phony war? We’ve been had. For what? Think all Bond movies ever – for power and money but mostly for money. The dollar is on the brink of collapse – and the billionaires billions are at risk. Bring on a pandemic and a war to necessitate a new digital currency and their billions are secure. They haven’t hidden anything and they’re definitely laughing at us for still believing it at this point.
In March 2020, in this country it all felt a bit like an episode of Doctor Who.
Or an episode of Derren Brown – I’m still waiting for him to appear and confirm it was all a set-up.
Or Kenny Craig.
It’s March 2022 now and the whole of Finland is still in face masks in the shops and on public transport. And no sign of it ending – none.
Most countries were doing the same, the governments were all talking the same, acting the same with a few tweaks here and there, if it looks like a lockstep plan…..
How did we get here?
Over the course of a week in early March 2020 the entire Western health and medical establishment uniformly changed tune, as if all contacted simultaneously by a message from god, or hypnotised by something strangely gripping that had occured, in unison, behind the scenes, in a week? Curious wasn’t it Geroge.
We had long held pandemic preparedness plans that ruled out contact tracing, forced quarantining of the healthy, shutting businesses and schools, mass testing (absent any physical symptoms or diagnosis no less) etc, and we chucked it out the window. Wholesale. No thank you decades of wisdom, we won’t be needing you.
The Swine Flu scandal of a decade earlier, perpetuated by the same cast of characters, using the same set-up, the same techniques to overclock the models and overstate the leathality, was all geared towards getting the WHO to hit the medical R&D ‘Jackpot’, by declaring a Pandemic, automatically unlocking level 42 grants, funding and orders, as exposed in the excellent documentary TrustWHO in 2016, and leading to a bungled vaccine that did far more harm than good and wasted governments millions. Sounds familiar.
(I look forward to the next installment of the womans documentary, perhaps called TrustWHO 2: Total Bongo-Bongo-2 (or Universal Social Justice Soldier: Narrative Unjudged). The WHO calling a Pandemic is presumably what the Drostens and Fergusons live for. They fudge their way through until, Yahtzee! Perhaps moonlighting to model other intangible, unquantifiable abstracts that can’t be verified (or if they are they miraculously fail upwards into a promotion?), or make predictions to cross examine post-retirement.)
Only in 2019 they had far more levers to pull, as technological tools for propaganda disptach and surveillance could open doors and prolong the grift previous scandals just couldn’t reach.
Like Swine flu, Sars-Cov-2 wouldnt be hemmed in by pesky facts or truths, the entire pandemic was based on a test for which there are no constants. The swab alters, the test kit alters, the primers and agents alter, the genes screened alter, the Ct is altered, and then theres no diagnosis, no symptoms even required. A perfectly healthy individual who naturally fought off the virus a month ago but has dead viral debris is, in the 2020 pandemic scandal, an infection.
Suffice to say, every single one of our instituions jumped on the grant, funding and R&D bandwagon, played along, with an abundnce of caution you understand cough cough, on the side of caution, with regret, to play it safe…
Cue fake studies, with fake data, in fake news journals like NEJM and the Lancet. A collusion of corrupted or weapons-grade stupid health officials to malign the thousands of just and right Drs, Profs and clinicians who promoted our preparedness plans and even GB Declaration. With the assistance of Big tech and Big media and Big intel. Big lol.
Basically an orgy of lies, from a group of known medical con merchants… for money, status, power and for minnions to appear virtuous.
Then other parties realised the “unique opportunity Covid presented”, to co-opt the situation, to “never let a good crisis go to waste”, real or imaginary, cut in with numerous complimentary pursuits, like novel mRNA inoculants, digital IDs, demonstrating WFH can offshore far more western jobs etc.
And they’re all incentivised to keep the covid gravy train going.
Thank god they crafted the entire edifice out of falsities they control, and not emperical truths, ‘cos with bogus data it can be tourtued enough to confess to anything.
“We had long held pandemic preparedness plans”
which apparently we had to throw out because it was for flu – not coronavirus – at least that is the line they are taking.
I think the architects of our lockdown should be forced to write pandemic preparedness plans for flu, coronavirus, plague and anything else we can think of. It gives us something to throw away when the time comes
A preparedness plan for Zero Carbon would have been wonderful 20 years ago. Still essential today.
If, of course, prepared by honest people with IQ scores bigger than their hat size.
Brilliant take down.
I was too lazy to do all the work you have done. I read the article before commenting and reading your excellent piece – says it all.
Tip o’ the hat.
Conspiracy Corner, do we know whats really going on in China? Well, no, but we know their stats are a nonsense, and they happily lied to the world about the virus and who knows what else.
There are some critical twitter accounts, but ever the uber sceptic (EK?), are they real or more propaganda?
https://nitter.net/songpinganq
https://nitter.net/truthabtchina
If our ruling classes want to emulate totalitarian Chinese social credit systems perhaps deliverance, somewhat counter-intuitively, comes from China? If the Chinese were to revolt en masse, as they have done during every previous dynasty covering millenia, this would likely make our ruling class think twice if not demolish their designs. No hard feelings guys, its a fugazi.
The younger generation in China also have much easier lives than their ancestors, who worked their fingers to the bone, but the youth don’t fancy boney fingers. A trend of ‘lying flat’ or not working as hard and cruising through life with junk food delivery and devices as entertainment is growing. Eventually this would be expected to snap one way or another, like pro-democracy Hong Kong ’19 times ten?
by special request
Superb
shamelessly stolen from order-order
The Smiling Assassin
How does one respond to drivel such as this? Are DS putting this crap up just so that we BTL can have a discussion? Where has this guy been living these last two years?
Depressing.
Perhaps website visitors should strike until Toby provides some sort of no win no fee scheme whereby he doesnt get our viewing stats until digital IDs are binned?
In general my health status will no longer be of any concern to the ‘state’. I neither want to interact with the ‘state’ nor will I expect anything from it. I will make my own health choices and decisions from now on. Plus, I would like all my National Insurance ‘contributions’ back, primarily for breach of contract and non-fulfilment of agreed service (this is of course tongue in cheek, but that’s how I feel).
None of this means a jot to the bedwetters who always, always, always default to ‘we had no choice’ nonsense.
It all went wrong when evil powerful people around the world coordinated in a Big Lie that Covid was an emergency
A brilliant article – thank you.
So how do we ensure that the public health inquiry looks at how we could have minimised the impact of covid 19 rather than minimising covid 19? I know we can write to try to change the terms of reference but fear those voices will be invisible and will be ignored.
Anyone fancy starting a petition?
This article would have use, if it was written in March 2020.
Drosten’s PCR test made it all happen. Without the ability to define asymptomatic people as disease vectors there is no ability to enforce the rest.
Drosten is up to his neck in Gates/WEF connections.
How did we get here?
Easy. Firstly. We, The West, have a scientifically illiterate Political and Media elite. Secondly we kow tow to the rich. Thirdly and most importantly Follow the Money.
Shows just how quickly mass formation hypnosis can develop in susceptible minds. Those who dont question dont think. They are trying to create a world where we are spoon fed what is right and wrong so we dont have to worry our silly little heads.
Pretty much.
I’d add that there appears to be a reluctance in politics to discuss second-order effects — the things that happen because of a policy that aren’t related to the immediate policy goal.
I think that this is because they can spin a policy agenda that minimises discussion of the second order effects (therefore they ‘don’t exist’), they can focus their success-criteria on one half of the equation (thus meaning ‘success’ is far more likely) and because they’ll probably be gone before the second order impact is felt and that can be someone else’s problem (or they can blame a new bogeyman, eg Russia).
You see this all the time, from local government up to international scale politics. Of course, the problem isn’t that they do this, but rather that the public lets them.
Bill Gates says having an electronic tattoo on each person will become part of everyday life
https://unitynewsnetwork.co.uk/bill-gates-says-having-an-electronic-tattoo-on-each-person-will-become-part-of-everyday-life/
David Clews
Despite this most people attended demoes and Stand in the Park are acting as if everything is back to normal.
Saturday 26th March 1pm to 3pm
Yellow Boards LONDON
Junction Victoria St/Bressenden Pl
London SW1E 5NA
Stand in the Park Sundays from 10am – make friends & keep sane
Wokingham Howard Palmer Gardens
(Cockpit Path car park free on Sunday)
Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Telegram http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
“Bill Gates says having an electronic tattoo on each person will become part of everyday life.”
Yet another story putting the lie to the suggestion that Lord Bill of the Gates of Hell is a philanthropist. Not content with destroying the livelihoods of thousands of computer software engineers he now wants to take over all the tattoo parlours.
This man has no shame.
Nothing beats being wise after the event.
Convid was only the key, ‘for the the globalist Party of Davos to enrich themselves and impoverish the masses by rampant taxation and inflation to destroy any savings. By printing money at the public expense to hand to the already rich so they can continue to buy assets – largely shares and property – and skew the market even further for the globalist establishment elites against the masses whom they wish to reduce to serfdom. The rigged system on show for the world to see’.
If it wasn’t orchestrated, it surely developed immediately into solely an international pi**ing contest about a few, objectively questionable if not meaningless, statistics.
There is a similar argument to be made for the vaccination program. The public health justification went from “we need to get people vaccinated to protect them from getting sick” to “we need to get people vaccinated”. Vaccination numbers became the metric rather than the metric being whether people were getting sick. Now nobody cares about the actual infection rate or adverse events, and everything is justified that forces people to get vaccinated.
I can imagine a process similar to this one is what Germans went through after WWII, asking themselves how their country was taken over by Nazism and driven to a catastrophic world war and attempted genocide.
And I can imagine that they employed the same evasive tactics as this article to intellectualise and explain away the whole thing, as a set of systemic circumstances.
The real answer is in the heart of every individual who allowed it to happen. The question people need to ask themselves is: “how did I come to allow this?” Was if fear, was it desire to conform, why was I unable to stand up to and resist what is obviously wrong?
It’s not a question about society, it is a question each individual needs to ask himself about his own character and his values.
Exactly.
One of the best “antivax” comments I’ve read .-
If you’ve ever wondered how so many ordinary decent people just stood and watched as Germany descended into Fascism – you do now.
https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
It did no go wrong, it went exactly according to plan – until people begin to wake up and accept this, they will not understand what is happening now and even worse, what will be happening next.
This is not a time to look backwards but a last chance to try and prevent what is to come
https://ourdecisiontoo.com/Issue/there-s-nothing-left-to-do-but-go-our-separate-ways/320/
It had been here for at least three months or so before the paranoia started.
I still feel all of this hangs over us like the sword of Damocles and it will only take enough bleating in Boris’s ear for us to move back into restrictions and mandates.
Me too. I’ll start to feel relieved once the free testing is also gone. Until this has happened, we’re all basically just prisoners who got out early on unknown probation terms. We can all be imprisoned again at a moment’s notice and there’s nothing which can be done about that.
I do not see that the Government got it so wrong. Governments never get big decisions right in the first place. They always follow the main thinking. In the past that was the electorate. Who usually understand better than Government what they need. Over the last 40 yrs or so Government has grown bigger and more withdrawn into bureaucratic decision making. I believe they wanted to control the population and they wanted to destroy economies because they knew the present spending, taxing, spending cycle had to end.
They did not give a thought to the emotional toll or the societal toll they would create.