In this week’s Spectator I’ve written about female privilege and how it accounts for public policy wrong-turns, such as the lockdown and Net Zero. Here’s how it begins:
A few weeks ago I had a crack at coming up with my own sociological ‘law’ and my first effort went as follows: “The more progressive a country is when it comes to sex and gender, the more authoritarian it is when it comes to speech and language.” I was thinking of Ireland which, having legalised abortion in 2018, is about to impose the most draconian speech restrictions in Europe. I now propose a second law: “Any group described as privileged is in fact marginalised; and any group described as marginalised is in fact privileged.”
A case in point is white men – and in particular cisgendered, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class white men – who are now at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy of oppression in most professions. But to add to their misery, these poor, benighted souls have to pretend they’re at the top of that self-same pyramid if they’re to retain their jobs, apologising for their ‘privilege’ in front of their more powerful black, female, non-binary, gay and disabled colleagues.
Some will think I’m being deliberately provocative, so I’ll reel off some facts and figures to illustrate this point with respect to just two groups: men and women. Their relative status is the exact opposite of how it’s usually described, making it the perfect illustration of Young’s Second Law. Some of the stats about just how underprivileged men are probably won’t come as a surprise. We all know boys fare worse than girls at school, one reason 35,000 fewer 18-year-old boys will go to university this month than 18-year-old girls. We also know that men are more likely to be addicted to drugs and alcohol, account for three-quarters of all suicides and almost 90% of the homeless. But did you know men make up 96.2% of Britain’s prison population and are 23 times more likely to die at work than women? Research carried out by the Future Men charity found that 29% of young men feel ignored, which perhaps isn’t surprising given that we have a Minister for Women and Equalities and a Women’s Health Ambassador, but no minister for men.
The idea that women are the less ‘privileged’ sex is a cliché that men are obliged to trot out if they’re to avoid social ostracisation or worse. But it’s a myth, as the American journalist John Tierney pointed out in a brilliant article in City Journal last week. “If the patriarchy really did rule our society, the stock father character in television sitcoms would not be the ‘doofus dad’ like Homer Simpson,” he wrote. “Smug misandry has been box-office gold for Barbie, which delights in writing off men as hapless romantic partners, leering jerks, violent buffoons and dim-witted tyrants who ought to let women run the world.”
Unfortunately, they do. I’m not just thinking of the success of politicians like Angela Merkel, Nicola Sturgeon and Jacinda Ardern, but the way in which public life has become feminised over the past 25 years. Women may still be a minority in the chancelleries of Europe – although for how much longer? – yet because they’re so much more confident and morally forthright than their ‘privileged’ male colleagues, they’ve become the key decision-makers. How else to explain the emergence of ‘safety’ as a sacred value in all areas of public policy? Women are, on average, more risk-averse than men, which means they’re less hesitant about jettisoning hard-won liberties to reduce the likelihood of various worst-case scenarios materialising, whether it’s locking us in our homes to ‘protect’ us from a flu-like respiratory virus or forcing us to drive at 20mph to avoid thermogeddon.
Worth reading in full.
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Mask effects are:
1-You are advertising yourself as an idiot
2-You are admitting you are ugly
3-Both 1 and 2
You eat bacteria, co2, plastic carcinogens and reduce oxygen levels and they do nothing against a 0.03 sized nano sized particle I am not the science but I would classify that as unhealthy.
It’s staggering it has taken 3 years
An A level science class could design the experiment
‘….for years and years and years the Chief Medical Officers and their departments are supposed to have been preparing for the next pandemic, they even had some high-placed people doing that, importantly, and yet they had completely failed to invest in assessment and development of physical interventions, new physical interventions, and even new materials and new technologies. They have completely failed to do that…’
That kind of comment could no doubt read across to most sectors of government in this country, all the while intervening with regulations to make life more difficult, expensive for private citizens, the private sector, ‘net zero’ being the most remarkably stupid example ‘de nos jours’
I looked up the C.V. of a particular MP this morning: ‘After her graduation (University of Sussex)…. became a policy adviser to her father, in his role as a MEP. Prior to her election she was chief executive of the National Pony Society, an animal welfare charity…..and then a local borough councillor…..’
Belgium showed us the way:
‘….the longest period in which a country has been without an elected government, at 589 days’
Sort of related, but were people aware of this? Football regulator: New white paper delayed until later this month – BBC Sport
The publication of the UK government’s long-awaited white paper proposing reforms to shake up football has been delayed to later this month.
So we’re in a perma-crisis but the government has time to poke its nose into FOOTBALL – a sport that appears to be thriving at every level – popular, not short of money. If there was ever a non-problem, football in the UK is it (and even if it were a problem, WTAF does it have to do with HMG?). The “Culture secretary” is involved. Why do we need a “Culture secretary”, or can we afford one when the government can’t even catch criminals or ensure the conditions are optimised for us to have cheap energy with no political strings, protect our borders.
FOOTBALL – a sport that appears to be thriving at every level
That’s the problem tof – thriving. We can’t be having thriving in the UK. Only one solution, government involvement. Where there isn’t a problem introduce government and there soon will be. And what do problems require?
Solutions. Nice and tidy.
Bang on the money!
Yet more evidence that this is a ‘democratic’ socialist fascist government.
‘Italy was the first state, together with the Soviet Union, to organize [an explicit] policy that would lead the country to become a sports nation.’ In this regard, Mussolini’s plan began with the promotion of new soccer clubs and huge stadiums across Italy.’
‘When Giorgio Vaccaro, the FIGC president, met with Mussolini to officially inform him that Italy would host the second World Cup, the following dialogue reportedly occurred:
The Duce sounds exactly like Hancock……
Thanks to Dr Tom Jefferson and the other authors for doing this very important Cochrane review
A statement like there doesn’t appear to be any convincing evidence that masks make any difference to transmission. They may do, but the evidence is not present from trials at present is all the mask-pushers need: Masks may work! The precautionary principle dictates that they must be worn! In fact, even Chris Whitty, UK mask-pusher in chief of not that long ago, never claimed anything else. He always just said that masks may reduce transmission by …%.
Considering this, Dr Jefferson, no thanks for this interview. A more honest summary would be We don’t now what – if any – effect masks have on transmission. They might prevent it. Or enhance it. Or – depending on the situation – might both prevent it in some cases and enhance in some other cases. Or they might have no effect on it at all. And because we don’t know this, no rational argument for wearing or even mandating them can be made.
From the authors’ conclusions on page 3 of the full report
Harms associated with physical interventions were under-investigated
And the confidence intervals of masks effectiveness includes negative and positive efficacy as indicated in the transcript above.
An acknowledgement of uncertainty is all that the authors are doing and that acknowledgement strengthens the case against masks in my view, when compared with the un-evidenced assertions that masks work.
I’m specifically referring to the sentence from the interview I quoted. That’s exactly the completely official argument in support of masks: They may prevent transmissions. True believers are convinced they do. So-called scientists mandated them based on an appeal for ignorance which is a logical fallacy.
And my point is that it’s almost impossible to conduct an interview like this and not say something that could be taken out of context or twisted in some way. The confidence interval itself is mentioned in this interview albeit by Carl Heneghan
And that the review itself is the evaluation of the evidence and not a line from an interview about it.
Given the amazing job Tom Jefferson has done in destroying the case for masks, to say ‘no thanks for the interview’ is somewhat mean spirited in my view.
I’ve neither taken this out of context nor twisted it anyhow. In the answer to the third question, it’s stated that
The result means that regardless of what pathogen or what presenting symptom there is no evidence from high quality studies that either medical or surgical masks make any difference to transmission,
This reappears in the answer to the fourth question in weaker form as
there doesn’t appear to be any convincing evidence that masks make any difference to transmission. They may do, but the evidence is not present from trials at present.
And that’s, for all practical purposes, just Chris Witty’s Masks may reduce transmission. Plus a hint that future trials may well additionally prove that they do. That’s not helpful unless the agenda is mask marketing or even mask mandate marketing and a simple admission of ignorance (like the example I gave) had served the case against masks, if that’s supposed to be a case against masks, much better.
Don’t get me wrong, I am glad people are gathering scientific evidence to demonstrate the futility of masks.
However, it’s a terrible indictment of our society that scientific evidence is required in the first place to demonstrate something so spectacularly obvious.
If there was an advantage to covering our mouths in some way, I am quite certain that we would have evolved in that way, much like our eyes have a cover. Or our ears. But I’m pretty sure our mouths and noses are open for a very good reason.
But such are things now that if the government mandated that everyone had to block our anal passage with a cork while out and about, we’d be compelled to conduct a range of scientific studies to demonstrate that it was probably a really bad idea.
How many decades has the medical profession being using masks and only now they discover this.