Yes, I know, starting a column by talking briefly about one of the world’s great philosophers is a bit odd. But bear with me. I’m going to relate this back to today’s woke ideologies. First, though, let’s go to the great Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. This Scots-Canadian writer thinks Hume is the greatest philosopher ever to have lived. But agree or disagree with me on that front, you know he must be an importantly august figure when you recall that Edinburgh University recently took its illustrious native city son’s name off a university building after a student survey ludicrously condemned the great man. And then the university’s ‘equality and diversity’ committee sided with the students. (Every ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ bureaucracy in every university needs to be shut down the way Ron DeSantis closed them down in Florida. These DEI bureaucrats, all over-paid, deal solely in identity politics, not individualism and merit; they ironically obliterate viewpoint diversity in all universities; and they get things right about as frequently as a Transit of Venus.)
But back to Hume. His powerful insights were myriad including on how to think about miracles, causation, economics, religion and morality. But for the purposes of this column recall that Hume was a great empiricist (getting there in a round-about way). You may not be able to prove it deductively, he argued, but there is an external, causal world outside our minds. (Hume gave the perfect response to Berkeley on this, by the way.) Put bluntly, there just are mind-independent truths about the world and these are imposed on us humans whatever our individual preferences, desires and druthers might happen to be. Accordingly, there are no ‘my truths’. There is just one truth about the myriad questions about the mind-independent world. Some of these we limited biological humans can know very confidently (I’m betting the Sun comes up tomorrow); some are very complicated and so always in play, at least around the edges; and some truths are out there but we humans are too limited ever to know or discover them.
Now that sort of basic worldview became widespread after the Enlightenment – the Scottish version of the Enlightenment with Hume and Adam Smith, for what it’s worth, being more insightful and more liberal than the French variant with the okay Voltaire and the truly despicable Rousseau. But one of the core achievements of the whole woke, identity politics worldview is to attack and undermine this inheritance and then force-feed to our students a very different, non-Enlightenment understanding about the world. It’s a wrong understanding but we have let its proponents capture all the main cultural institutions. This identity politics’ worldview puts politics above the search for empirical truths. So if the facts were to show, say, that males have a different distribution of intelligence (same median scores but differences at each end of the distribution) than females or that there are statistically meaningful differences in terms of male-female preferences, that is to be silenced because politically these woke identity politics pushers want to put individuals into groups and then explain all group differences in terms of discrimination, oppression and power. It’s a rewarmed variant of Marxism, just in non-economic clothes now. And this thinking, I’m afraid, undergirds even the Julie Bishop desire for Liberal Party soft quotas. The core point is that where truth conflicts with desired political outcomes you suppress truth. That’s how you can get away with writing books about the supposedly amazing agricultural achievements of hunter-gatherer peoples – you let your subjective druthers trump true facts.
Here’s another way this plays out. This non-Enlightenment, identitarian worldview often makes one’s subjective preferences and desires more important than mind-independent truths about the world. Only sometimes of course. And when that is and when it isn’t can be wholly arbitrary at times. For instance, if a 43-year-old man says “look, I identify as a 13-year-old and want to play under-14 rugby” the whole of the progressive political world – including doctors’ organisations, the UN, the International Olympic Committee, a few child acting stars who played in the Harry Potter movies, half the Liberal Party and the whole of the Anglosphere’s university senior managerial class – does not promptly kick into action to demand that that guy’s subjective preferences and desires hereafter will trump what we all know is true about the external causal world (including that the actual 13 year-olds could get badly hurt playing with an adult full-grown male). Nor do taxpayers stump up huge monies to provide free plastic surgeries that make the old guy look a bit younger or pump him full of drugs to mimic some of the features of youth. The same general unwillingness to allow someone’s subjective feelings to trump truth occurs where some white person announces that she now identifies as a black or an Aborigine. (Well, affirmative action benefits being what they are these days you do get more than a few Elizabeth Warrens out there trying this one on, sometimes successfully, but on this one, on the whole, the inner-city progressive population does not lose its mind wanting truth to lose to subjective feelings.)
So you can’t point to your own druthers and claim to be younger or to be a different race and expect all the rest of society to genuflect at the foot of your subjective preferences. We point to mind-independent truths. But for some reason, and it seems rather arbitrary really, many people in today’s Western societies seem wholly prepared to do this as regards sex. The mind-independent truth which Richard Dawkins and many others lay out nicely is that sex is binary; that males are in statistical terms bigger, faster and stronger – the then-world champion U.S. national women’s soccer team a few years back lost to an under-16 Dallas boys’ team, and it wasn’t close – and the athletic advantages of testosterone and muscle twitch speed tell us why women who transition to men never come close to making any men’s teams in anything, but the other way round fifth-rate loser men do dominate. They unfairly take places away from girls and women. That is the factual truth that the external, causal world imposes on us all. One’s subjective desires are neither here nor there. The very brave J.K. Rowling, another Scot, gets this correct down the line. In fact, the progressive, woke position is near-on incoherent. Most, like me, don’t care at all how some adult wants to dress or live or do to him or herself. But we do care about truth, about enforced untrue pronouns, and about some of the malign things that can flow from ignoring truth – think male rapists actually being put into women’s prisons, such are the mental idiocies of the woke mind. Or operating on kids who can’t buy cigarettes, drink or join the army yet.
Now it’s possible the tide is starting to turn on this. You can only run positions patently at odds with the truth about the external, causal world for so long (though this idiocy started when we allowed a term of grammar, ‘gender’, to usurp the factual term ‘sex’ and then let the ‘it’s all socially constructed’ BS come to dominate).
Be brave. Speak the truth. We’re starting to win on this one.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Spectator Australia.
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Can you imagine if they’d had a PCR test for flu and for years prior to 2020 it was just normal and encouraged by government health officials to use these LFTs and PCRs routinely, even if you didn’t have any symptoms? We’d be dab hands at this lockdown business by now wouldn’t we? The world would have ground to a halt years ago because it would be inevitable that they could manufacture a flu ”pandemic” every single year based solely on mass testing. The entire scamdemic rested entirely on the testing.
Even the PsyOp wouldn’t have had much effect without the testing because those ‘positive’ test results needed to be generated. Otherwise people would twig and think, ”what’s all the fuss about? I feel fine/no worse than previous viruses I’ve had. Why do I need to stay home and stop living? Only the old people are dying, like they do every winter” So, without turning this into an essay, the only way they can even attempt a future scamdemic is if they go back to mass testing, this time for another ”novel” and ”deadly” virus that we allegedly have zero immunity against. And if the same people fall for that humongous farce again then they really have got excrement for brains.
Hancock is a loathesome piece of trash but so is this fake inquiry, handled by the Rona true believers (the mafia investigating itself).
But as the article states there will be a ‘consensus’ around Wancocks’s views.
‘Dames, Ladys, Sirs’….what a joke. Our ‘betters’, ‘superiors’.
No they are not smart. They are as dumb as they look and more corrupt. All of them swilled in the Rona trough of billions.
$120 mn quid this will cost us. For what?
To tell us that we will be imprisoned and stabbed again circa 2025 to 2030, to meet Agenda 2030’s goals?
We need a real inquiry, by real people, with real questions, real data, real facts, about real things like LD and stab deaths and injury, vs the real 20K dead from Rona, not with fake tests.
We don’t need the usual pantomine which asks nothing of importance. I wouldn’t doubt if the ‘report’ is already written.
To be fair, in defence of his strategy, I reckon I could suppress Matt Hancock “out of the air.” I just require a Titan sub to do it.
I would love to suppress Wancock with a very large rock dropped from a cliff on top of the soyboy below, as he fondles his married lover.
Ferdill,
It Has been suggested by some heartless people, perhaps those naughty “far-right” folk we are constantly warned about; that we need a Real Inquiry, with Real Peasants, Real Flaming Torches and Real, well sharpened Pitchforks.
Whilst such an Inquiry might be more productive than your sensible and quite modest proposal, I fear we are extremely unlikely to get either.
There was no pandemic
Yep no painted cross on any door I saw, no carts going round collecting the dead, but some Welsh councils did dig some extra graves just in case. A lot of “measures” were a modern version of the King Charles 2nd version of 1666, so there was some planning.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/lessons/2267-popup.htm
Sadly – needed repeating tof.
It seems to me like the strategy of the establishment for cementing lockdowns, testing, masks and jabs as the default response to future “pandemics” is to pretend that the effects of flu are radically different to coronavirus or other respiratory viruses, and so require a radically different approach.
I suppose the public aren’t scared enough of the flu so they need to be gaslighted into thinking flus and colds are so radically different as to requite radically.different approaches
One of the essential ingredients of the hoax, yes.
The reason why this committee met last in 2010 is obviously that there was never a reason to exist for it at all save as Government’s doing something!
headline generator at a time when the WHO was trying to inflict another Deadly pandemic!!1 onto mankind. 2009 – swine flu hoax. 2010 – end of political fallout from that.
Give me patience, Lord, and please administer a celestial size 11 boot up the backsides of these numpties.
There was no pandemic. There have been no real “public health” emergencies in decades, except for those that seem to have been caused by “authority” insisting on mandated poisoning of the environment and the animal and human populations.
I don’t recall growing up under the shadow of fear from disease, this is a new thing created in the last 20 years. Seems that those with vested interests like to perpetuate the myth that disease and pestilence would be stalking the population without them riding to rescue on white chargers brandishing syringes full of the latest patented prophylactic.
I don’t recall growing up under the shadow of fear from disease, this is a new thing created in the last 20 years.
2004, to be precise, the Bird Flu pandemic which never was and also the time when flu vaccines started to be marketed aggressively. By that time, I was very much surprised that someone even considered vaccinating people against the flu.
Yes and the line of questioning or reading between the lines of the KC seems to suggest his own bias and the inquiry conclusion already. Lock down sooner, more control in plans, harder lines of forced compliance, any suggestion of a novel virus treat as deadly to all, more control of the elderly …
And if they are still doing lateral flow tests to testify at this expensive spectacle ? Then it is a forgone conclusion. Authoritarian recommendations for the future.
When ignoring all the side issues, ie, hordes of Scottish and Welsn teetotalers charging into the hospitality industry on their wooden hobby horses, Corona was a giant money-making scam which probably only came to an end because taxpayers had been plunderen so thoroughly that there was nothing more left to take. The second season is to follow as soon as economic recoverly is complete enough that the merry looting can profitably recommence.
Have you noticed that people now often define themselves by their malady, “hello I’m diabetic/asthmatic/have ME/MS, an auto-immune disease/allergy? No longer are they the butcher, baker,candlestick maker. We need to stop talking about medical conditions and go back to talking about the weather…..
Ok, I think that you have not quite understood the tactics of the KC here. He is gradually asking questions to limit the answers that can be given later, Hancock has already said faster harder lockdowns, but there is no evidence that these did any good, and a great deal that they did so far, untold harm. The next question in module 2 will be something like “what made you think that lockdown was the correct policy”, followed by “what eveidence have you from the first, to decide on more?”. This puts the so called experts right on the line when they have to answer “none at all!”. Then “why did you call for the then”?
The next part will be expert evidence on the PCR tests (forget the lateral flows, they were just nonsense placebos, which were very non-specific). The answer to that will be they are very good and accurate. Except that they were not, because they were misused in method. 40 cycles would find a single incidence of a small bit of DNA in a sample. But it is widely known that this is far too sensitive, and does not show replicating anything! A test at 20 cycles (in other words about a million times less sensitive) would show a large population of the DNA, therefore likely real infection. The chance of a single incidence of something causing infection is very small.
As all of the above is well known science, why did they do 40 cycles? Because the Chinese told them to! There you have the whole scam in one sentance. Who profited? The Chinese. Who suffered severely, US. Job done!
As all of the above is well known science, why did they do 40 cycles?
As far as I know, that was because the two guys who developed and sold the original tests (Christian Drosten and a business partner of him who owns/ owned a company manufacturing such test kits) recommended doing so. Possibly unspecifically: Start with 20. Increase until you find something. That got us the pandemic where each and every conventional measure of disease was supplanted with positive test results plus something, eg, death because of skull trauma after getting hit by a cow suddenly falling from the sky with a positive test result a fortnight ago => COVID death, positive test result without anything else => asymptotically sick, chronic nosebleed because of constant swabbing => long COVID and so on.