Most of us I expect, first found this site after yelling into the void, “Am I alone in thinking… the very ancient shouldn’t be isolated in nursing homes for their own safety… that masking children is malevolent” and so on. The gush of relief it wasn’t just me fearing that Whitty et al. were fouling everything up was immense. Alas that dread hollow of thinking differently from the majority has yet again engulfed me. And this time there seems to be no Toby Young or Peter Hitchens to calmly reassure I’m not alone.
Am I alone in thinking… it’s wrong that all children are now tracked?
See: silence. No intake of breath. No tutting. No muttering disapproval. No national debate. No phone in on LBC. No social media backlash led by J.K. Rowling. No podcasts with lovely Right-leaning mothers sounding the alarm. No reports by Big Brother Watch wittily entitled Big Mother Watch. Nothing.
All our children are tracked and no-one bats an eyelid.
It turns out everyone’s been doing it for years; I only noticed on Saturday. My 15 year-old son was at a party and the pick up was down some complicated farm track. I was the last parent owing to getting lost. On the way home I asked my son if any other parents were late. “No, they put a pin in where their child is.” Like some batty old Aunt I kept asking him how they knew where to go – I also had the address but the postcode didn’t correspond to the house. He sighed in exasperation, “They’re all tracked, so you see where the person is, put a pin in Google maps and drive.”
“Tracked? What do you mean? What for? The parents know where you are – they dropped you off? What? Tracked all the time? Why? How long has this been going on? But you’re all 16 – isn’t that creepy? Should I be tracking you and your brothers?”
“NO!” he finally said to shut me up, “I love being the only one who’s not tracked.”
On the fringes of the sceptic movement are those who worry about the implementation of a Chinese style social credit system, and even further away are those who suggest the next step in this top-down control will involve micro-chipping babies in the same way we do cats and dogs. As far as I can see this fresh vision of misery has already arrived: all children are tracked and have been for years, and it doesn’t concern anyone.
Perhaps I’ll be accused of neglect for not tracking my six-foot-two sons. What an odd thought. The eldest was in Sicily last week on a field trip. Imagine if I did track him and saw his little blob (I honestly have no idea what an avatar of a real-life person looks like on a tracking app) teetering on the edge of Mount Etna, or the sea, or in a bar. What would I do with that information: message him and tell him to get to safety quickly? Ignore or panic? All options seem pointless.
“But he might be dead,” suggests my husband helpfully.
“Well in that case he’ll be dead,” I snap, “And tracking him won’t help.”
“Or kidnapped then, or injured.”
“It hasn’t happened yet.”
“Michael Mosley,” my husband adds with due solemnity.
My questions are these: are children grateful for being tracked because it’s stopped them worrying about themselves dying, becoming injured or kidnapped? In which case, being tracked has solved millennia of panic, and we can all sing praises to the beneficent god of Life360 – though I’m not sure recent child mental health statistics back this up. Or am I alone in thinking that it is morally outrageous and socially damaging to track children. What about freedom? Adventure? Exploration? Independence? Growing up? Not tracking human beings?
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
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I don’t know how Chris keeps going in the face of the msm lie machine and the dishonest scientists on the other side. Well done though I do notice climate scepticism becoming more mainstream especially on the right.
Scepticism in science is essential. Otherwise it isn’t science, it is activism.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Richard P. Feynman
“It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period.”
Richard P. Feynman
An incredibly smart man, he knew that he didn’t know. This is how scientists should think.
$cientists on the other hand…
nod———-Or “Ah yes, science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture from such a trifling investment of fact”——Mark Twain.
Scepticism = science; consensus = religion.
One of the main controllers of climate is El Nino and El Nina events. But data regarding these huge weather changing oscillations only goes back to 1989. ——It is worth pointing out to people who have already decided what is true about climate that there is actually nothing unusual about current temperatures or climate. To those people who are always saying things like “Climate Change is real and is happening now” what are you talking about? These kind of statements are about as scientific as a monkey with a test tube.
I’d say that climate change is normal; the climate is not normally stable at all. The real scam is manipulating the language, and perhaps the lack of understanding, so as to promote a campaign.
Remember when you say that “climate change is normal”, that the term “climate change” has come to mean changes allegedly caused by humans. It does not mean changes that occur naturally.
And Malenkevich cycles. The wobbles and orbits of the earth are not stable and affect hownclose we are to the sun.
And sunspot activity. Climate change and global warming are lies by green communists
I still worry about the polar bears.
“When Al Gore was born there were about 5,000 polar bears, today only 25,000 remain.”
Someone forgot to tell them bears they are supposed to be in deep sh.t
“The arctic will be ice free by 2015”
– John Kerry 2009
A true visionary.
It must be catastrophic. There are no penguins left in the Arctic and the polar bears obviously can’t cope with the lack of ice in Antarctica.
I was about to politely correct you and then saw what you did there, faffor
…and the fish population of Mt Everest has been utterly devastated.
I don’t see anything soaring. What I see is an incredibly stable pattern which confirms to me the absolutely staggering and amazing predictability of our weather.
The seasons come and go almost like clockwork. Temperatures move within the narrowest of bands.
How something so vast and complex works so elegantly is really a thing of beauty. Much like the human body or any living organism.
Which is what makes the idea that you can just control the weather by fiddling with CO2 so comical and preposterous.
Thanks beautifully expressed post.
Played for Fools
Great article, as ever. It seems to me that the western world are being played for a bunch of fools on climate change;
China has announced its new climate envoy;
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202401/1305432.shtml
Whilst at the same time China continues to burn coal as if butter would not melt in their mouths!
”There are a total of 3,092 operating coal-fired power plant units in China. As of January 2023, the province of Shandong, which lies to the south of Beijing, houses the greatest number of coal power plants, at over 400 units.3 Jan 2024”
As I say, it seems to me that we are being played for a bunch of fools, while China, Russia etc. plan the demise of the western world.
We are being played for fools? ——-But the western world is complaint with this. To understand why, you need to realise what the politics are all about. Then to realise that the Sustainable Development Politics isn’t really about the climate. The climate is simply the excuse given to the public for the politics.
Western world is compliant. Exactly. Fat, lazy and stupid we have become.
Lucky you realised I meant compliant rather than complaint.
Club of Rome 1972.
China and Russia don’t have to play us for fools we are doing OK just destroying ourselves.
nod——–Then you have to figure out why. Once you do, it will explain why there really isn’t a climate crisis and why a crisis is essential for putting political agenda’s in place and government never want to let a good crisis go to waste.
Excellent article as always, Chris. I wish there was some mechanism within the DS software to give articles ‘likes’ (as on FB) or…stars? (As on Off Guardian.)
There used to be, but what works better for ranking is activity, i.e. comments BTL.
Seconded
There was a large increase but November was rather low so it doesn’t take the level to anything extraordinary. As you can see from this chart, if you look at the whole of 2023 ice extents followed the the 2010-20 average pretty closely.
Tony Heller you are emphatically not; is there no end to the Diversity of your Expertise?
Yeah I saw this story on the BBC