I realise I’m late to this particular cultural post-mortem, but last week I watched Adolescence, the much-discussed Netflix drama centred on a 13 year-old white boy accused of murdering a female classmate at his school and the emotional fallout that follows.
Contrary to the usual refrain – I watched it so you don’t have to – I think, in fact, you probably should.
Whether by marketing design or pure coincidence, the show arrived amid a great deal of outrage: accusations that it distorts the demographics of youth violence, that it stokes panic about alienated boys, or that it offers up yet another heavy-handed morality tale in prestige-drama packaging.
Unquestionably, it isn’t in any way an authentic portrayal of the reality of youth knife crime today. But I can’t agree that Adolescence is merely a didactic tract – it’s something else entirely.
Whatever the creators had in mind, the series is too well-constructed – too well-written – to be dismissed as a vehicle for narrative compliance. If the aim was simply to echo regime orthodoxy, it failed – and in failing, succeeded. What Adolescence delivers is a searing portrait of post-liberal Britain: atomised, emotionally barren, culturally incoherent.
Liberalism’s last reflex: caring loudly, doing nothing
The series captures the idea that in contemporary Britain meaningful ethical or cultural frameworks have been abandoned, and in their place, we now have shallow institutional gestures: cold bureaucracy, therapeutic language and surface-level sensitivity – all designed to manage symptoms, not address causes.
It isn’t only the family that suffers – though it’s clear they do, especially the father, who moves through the story in a state of subdued collapse. It’s everything around them – the state institutions, the police, the schooling system – all functioning with a kind of procedural emptiness. At times, the bleakness shades into what might be dark comedy – whether intentional or not is hard to say. What lingers is the tone of a flat, affectless, decaying society, drained of meaning.
One needn’t engage in some rarefied, counter-textual reading to see this, nor am I the first to say so. Carl Benjamin of the Lotus Eaters podcast has also made salient observations on this point. The drama offers glimpses – faint and passing – of what once counted as moral authority or adulthood. But they appear only as fragments, cultural remnants without a present to inhabit. It is difficult to believe the writers were entirely unaware of what they were doing. But who knows?
Yes, the show’s writers and producers were – probably – foolish to accept invitations to Downing Street, and to be coopted into Keir Starmer’s agenda into “rethinking adolescent safety and how to prevent young boys being dragged into [a] ‘whirlpool of hatred and misogyny’”. Such politically loaded phraseology instantly puts one on guard that the show is promoting regime talking points. In doing so, they have done – possibly – a disservice to themselves. You’ll notice the ‘probably’ and ‘possibly’ qualifiers here. We’ll return to that point later. But for now, it’s worth resisting the instinct to dismiss the work by association. What matters is what’s onscreen – and what’s onscreen is unflinchingly damning.
The point is: the one thing Adolescence definitively does not do is reaffirm liberal pieties. It is highly subversive of them. It anatomises their collapse. It presents a society not merely incapable of guiding its children but apparently puzzled as to why it ever imagined it should, and if anything opines for a lost tradition of moral certainty. It is, in that respect, a perfect metaphor for the exhaustion of liberal Britain at the end of history.
So, with apologies for any spoilers, let’s get to it. There’s quite a bit to unpick.
Of riot gear and raisin bran: the rituals of a hollow state
The cultural subversion – the satire, even – is apparent right at the beginning of episode one, with a ludicrously heavy-handed police raid on the boy’s suburban home. A dozen police vehicles, officers in riot gear and stab vests, descend upon a well-kept, modern, lower-middle-class new-build estate, battering down the door with illogically disproportionate force.
If that isn’t enough to signal the destabilising, absurdist, undertones, consider the dead hand of bureaucratic police procedure exerted on Jamie, the young murder suspect. Hauled away in a deeply distressed state, he undergoes an almost performative procedural booking in process at the station: being read his rights, asked if he wants a solicitor and breakfast – all delivered in a manner suited for an adult, not a 13 year-old child who clearly cannot comprehend any of it. He doesn’t really understand what’s happening – and that’s the point. He is an adolescent.
And if you watch closely, the camera lingers – just long enough – on the face of the main police character, Detective Inspector Bascombe. In one brief moment, a flicker of doubt passes across his expression. It’s subtle, but unmistakable: a hint that even within the machinery of the state, someone recognises the absurdity of treating a terrified child as though he were a hardened criminal, and that something more serious in society has gone, or is going, horribly wrong.
Empathy without authority, multiculturalism without morality
What is going wrong becomes evident to DI Bascombe in episode two, when he and Detective Sergeant Misha Frank visit Jamie’s school to gather information about the murder of Katie, the young victim. The officers traipse timidly through the school and have rings run around them – particularly by Jade, Katie’s black friend – whose contempt for institutional figures is unmistakable. Bascombe and Frank elicit no deference; whatever standing they once may have enjoyed as police officers has long since dissipated. (Does this seem familiar, perhaps, to us onlookers who now also regard the UK’s police with much the same disdain and hollowed-out confidence?)
This atmosphere of dysfunction is mirrored by the school itself – chaotic, noisy and rudderless. The staff are little better. Mr Malik, a Muslim teacher, is portrayed as feckless, drifting in and out of the classroom with no clear purpose. Mrs Fenumore, the senior teacher, is all toxic empathy and no moral authority – well-meaning but useless, adrift in the disorder. Her self-confessed verdict – “just absolute chaos” – lands as another pupil lobs obscenities down the corridor.
Jade is no comforting stereotype, either. She is portrayed as sullen, aggressive and seething with barely concealed rage. When she attacks Ryan – Jamie’s friend – he is subsequently questioned by the detectives. He emerges as articulate and unusually perceptive, a stark contrast to the caricature often expected. It’s also revealed that Katie had been cyberbullying Jamie – branding him an incel and mocking his awkward but benign attempts to connect with her after being rebuffed.
The drama thus refuses easy moral framing. There are no glib multicultural platitudes or gendered clichés. Even a passing reference by DS Frank to Andrew Tate and the spectre of violent incels is never developed – an ephemeral gesture toward a broader cultural anxiety, offered and discarded in a breath. It feels like a grasp at something external to explain what is, in truth, a deeper social rot – one that cannot be diagnosed by moral slogans or pinned on internet villains. In its refusal to flatter prevailing narratives, it is in fact, highly dissident.
Welcome to the holding pen: a policeman in the post-authority age
The figure of DI Bascombe is especially interesting. That he’s played by a black actor is, in this context, immaterial to any claim that he’s some liberal archetype. In fact, it makes his role more pointed as he is presented as an entirely normal, well-adjusted, integrated citizen no more equipped than anyone else to make sense of the bizarro world around him. In dramatic terms, he is the everyman: wandering through the desolate social landscape of post-ideological Britain, lost among feral school children, impotent teachers and collapsing adult authority.
Even his own family eludes him. The show makes it clear that he barely understands – let alone influences – his own son, a pupil at this same unravelling institution.
In one of the show’s most telling moments of dialogue, Bascombe turns to DS Frank, and exclaims:
Do you know what? I honestly… I just can’t stand this fucking place. Does it look like anyone’s learning anything in there to you? It just looks like a fucking holding pen. Videos in every class.
Most assuredly, then, this isn’t a paean to multicultural harmony or the heroism of teachers. It’s an indictment. And it sets the stage for one of the moments of noirish comedy: Ryan, Jamie’s friend, flees the school through a classroom window to avoid further questioning. Bascombe gives chase, weaving past teachers, administrators, even a man strimming the lawn – each a theoretical figure of authority, yet in practice passive, helpless and bewildered.
There is no moral messaging here. If anything, liberal good intentions are treated with withering detachment, while the police are rendered in part well-meaning, but also agents of a system long since detached from the reality it was meant to oversee.
Clipboard empathy: to be assessed, not understood
The theme of emotional sterility and atomising bureaucracy is highlighted in the following episode, where we meet Briony, a forensic psychologist tasked with preparing a pre-trial report on Jamie’s mental capacity. The setting is a youth detention facility, several months after the murder. What follows is an excavation into Jamie’s inner world – his unpredictability, his intelligence, his suspicions.
He believes Briony is trying to manipulate him into talking about his father and grandfather, nudging him toward some prescribed reflection on masculinity. She insists she only wants “a conversation”, but of course, she’s not there for idle chat. Her job is to draw him out, to categorise his thoughts on men, women and feelings – as if a 13 year-old boy might credibly navigate the adult vocabulary of identity and emotion. When he begins to open up, Jamie speaks about girls, sex and status with surprising candour, and we find ourselves in the bleak terrain of Snapchat, Instagram, topless selfies, and a kind of pre-packaged adulthood no one is equipped to manage.
Jamie, for his part, seems to think he’s formed a connection with Briony. But from her perspective, this is just another professional interaction – methodical, extractive and necessarily detached. At the close of their final session, Jamie, sensing the end, asks if she likes him. Briony hesitates, then replies that it’s not her job to like him, only to assess him. And so yes – he has been tricked, in a way. The moment shatters. Jamie lashes out, is restrained by a guard, and is dragged from the room shouting.
But in the final scene the camera lingers on Briony’s face – shaken, unreadable. Has she merely escaped a volatile boy’s fury, or has something deeper registered? We’re left uncertain. Perhaps Jamie’s predicament – that he’s still just a child, and one bullied, by girls no less – has struck closer to home than she’s prepared to admit.
Despair in aisle five
The final act in this tragedy takes place a year later, on Eddie’s birthday – a day that begins badly and only worsens. Eddie, by all accounts a good and kindly father, is beginning to crack under the strain. He finds his work van disfigured with graffiti: the word ‘Nonse’ scrawled across it – misspelled, misdirected and unconnected to Jamie’s crime, but damning all the same. His wife calls the police, calm but flat: “We’ll need to take photos of the offending word.” It’s a moment of deadpan despair –petty vandalism delivered with casual ignorance and met with procedural formality.
What follows is a family trip to Wainwrights – a stand-in for B&Q – to buy something to clean off the “offending word”. It is one of the drama’s best calibrated scenes: a darkly comic interweaving of domestic routine and private collapse. The checkout assistant asks whether Eddie has a discount card, oblivious to the slow-motion family breakdown unfolding in his purview. In the car park, Eddie spots the teenagers responsible for defacing his vehicle and, in a moment of rage, hurls the contents of the paint tin across the van. A security guard appears – not to intervene, but to ask if Eddie plans to clean up the mess.
Later, Jamie calls from detention to wish his father a happy birthday – and to say he intends to plead guilty. At home that evening, Eddie and his wife talk quietly, almost absently, about what they might have done differently. Could they have stepped in sooner? Should they have monitored the children’s phones more closely? Eddie, hollowed by grief and guilt, reflects that he never took his father’s belt to his kids – never ruled by fear – and yet, what did the softer approach achieve?
The drama offers no answer to that question. To the show’s credit it doesn’t try. But in the father’s closing line – “I should’ve been a better dad” – we are gently steered toward what might be the closest thing the series has to a moral centre: not a sermon, but a faint, regretful echo of traditional parental authority, lost and perhaps half-mourned.
You can’t always get the message you want: but sometimes you get the one that hurts
In the end, people will see in Adolescence what they want to see. If you’re looking for a parable about incels and online radicalisation, that’s exactly what it will become – regardless of the deeper, more unsettling subtexts running throughout, which, I would argue, are plainly visible to anyone willing to look.
You won’t find any mention of those in the Guardian or its epigones. Instead, expect lavish praise for the acting, followed by the usual liturgy about toxic masculinity and digital safety. Likewise, if you’re determined to view it as nothing more than regime propaganda – painted in stark moral binaries and slathered with populist slop to keep you on the outrage train – so be it. But don’t expect to learn anything. You’ll come away nourished only by your own certainty.
As I say, I have no idea of what was in the minds of the show’s creators or if they are fully paid-up members of Leftwing Luvvie Liberal London La-La Land, or if a vision of modern dysfunction is the one they wished to portray. But even it if wasn’t, sometimes the best of art escapes the intentions of its makers and becomes something else. And that something else, in this case, is deeply interesting.
Fair enough if you believe I’m overthinking all of this. But if nothing else, I hope I’ve offered a few tools for those inclined to attempt a counter-reading of Adolescence. What does seem especially risible, however, is the proposal – floated in Westminster – that this show be rolled out in schools nationwide. You must be catastrophically detached from any kind of reality, as our MPs always seem to be – or simply an utter clod – to imagine that most secondary school students will sit enraptured through van-bound monologues about takeaway orders and the tonal subtleties of A-ha. They will not be spellbound. They will be bored out of their minds.
More seriously, if I were Sir Keir Starmer, this is the last thing I would want shown in the classroom. It dismantles the last vestiges of a multicultural, therapeutic, post-liberal order. Before watching Adolescence, I was expecting late-stage post-totalitarian propaganda. I was wrong. I also assumed Netflix was simply burnishing its progressive credentials by offering it free to schools. Perhaps they are. But it’s just as possible that – intentionally or not – this is one of the most subversive cultural acts in recent memory.
Sometimes the sharpest elegies for a failing order arrive unannounced.
Michael Rainsborough is a writer and academic living in Australia. He is author of Terror in the Western Mind: Cultural Responses to 9/11 (2021), and is editor of A Front Row Seat at the End of History: The Untimely Essays of David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith, 1999-2024 (2025).
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The Dutch police thugs are absolutely dreadful. Every protest they instigate violence and set the police dogs on protestors. And what a surprise the Daily Hate instead of condoning it points out the protestors weren’t wearing masks! like that matters whilst an Alsatian has its jaws locked on your arm and a state thugs is hitting you round the head with a baton!
Come on Daily Sceptic at least criticise the mindless state violence if for some reason you won’t attack the UK state propaganda outlets and its agents for some reason.
Absolute joke.
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When you are demonised for speaking the truth you are living in tyranny.
I’d just like to point out that isn’t an Alsatian, don’t give us a bad name.
Animals don’t belong in human conflict zones or should be used as weapons by anyone, especially not the state. The police are out of control, the irony is that’s exactly what they have become under the liberal regime, control freaks who hunt in packs, their numbers give them confidence to abuse their power & any natural instinct to defend yourself is labelled resisting & assault on police. The system now only seeks to defend itself from those it was meant to serve.
The police are more of a danger to your safety than most criminals, if you’re robbed or assaulted by a criminal it’s over with in seconds or minutes, when the police assault you, they then abduct you, hold you hostage, quite possibly humiliate you, then label you for life with prejudice & malice.
The police are dishonest, violent & corrupt, I would never trust or co-operate with them. They have less respect for the law than most criminals & the state has given themselves the right to kill you without being able to defend yourself.
Agree. Have had direct experience of police violence here in Switzerland where they ‘shoot’ first, ask questions later. Individual officers are OK and approachable, but any group I’d quickly side swerve as their approach is militaristic. Violent attacks on individuals not uncommon, custody is a bit of a black box with myriad abuses, state prosecutors are wholly sympathetic to the police and will simply accept self defence as grounds. Something is rotten with policing in the state of Denmark, Switzerland, Holland, the UK and much of the ‘civilised’ world.
I’m not sure if it’s the individuals, but the management & training, that’s the problem & of course the politicization of police, one thing is for sure police are destroying the public trust.
That said, even as a young man way, way back a long time ago I recall police conducting themselves like arseholes. I would never engage with them & if I were stopped, I would simply ask if I were under arrest & say nothing more to them.
Indeed. I think we live in a culture where there is an unhealthy disrespect for authority, perversely (well, it isn’t doing anything to deserve it, after all). This breeds contempt for the police and their station, and feeds into a lack of respect for the job they do, insufficient pay for the rank and file and a resentment amongst the ranks that manifests through violence, not to mention corruption throughout the ranks. At the root of many of the problems is our failed education system – weird policing priorities (I read a story a few years ago about UK parents receiving a police visit because their toddler was paddling naked in a paddling pool in their private garden – slightly leftfield example, I know, but still!) and lack of education about the importance of the rule of law.
The job of the police has long been to protect and serve the interests of the elite. They have become so much more militarised over the past couple of decades (completely unnecessarily, often justified by false flag attacks and psy-ops).
Can’t see how the police can be seen as independent when it seems to be quite open knowledge that to get above a certain rank belonging to a secret society is very helpful (probably necessary), and then you are in the same club as many of the lawyers and politicians. Loyalty to fellow club members unfortunately outweighs any independence and integrity. Common Purpose training (brainwashing) also seems to be a problem, with all its greater good over individual freedoms doctrine.
Only unnecessary if there wasn’t something planned. Police have allows been there to uphold government police-y.
Army on the otherhand have historically been a threat to the powers that be, so no surprise that our army has been dismantled in the same time period.
The order followers in charge of the dogs are the problem. I never see a single officer ever stop from doing something that is obviously wrong if told it is ok to do so by an authority figure. The majority seem to enjoy violence and seem to get sexual gratification from strange practices like getting animals to attack fellow humans (exactly the same applies to the TSG in this country).
They are given the power to continue acting this way by the media who continuously promote them as hero’s. A few acts of goodness are probably outweighed by a hundred times the amount of acts of bullying or unnecessary violence.
You can see why the elite apparently call the police their ‘dogs’. Animals are better trained and more civil than most modern day police forces who resemble an out of control militarised gang.
Very good comments from both yourself and Darryl.
Many on here may be thinking the UK is out the woods on this tyranny, but one quick glance across the board at newspaper front covers tells us a different story.
Something is brewing and we’re on the cusp of a new wave of madness. All the usual arguments are being made and all the hysteria is being ramped up.
UK police showed over the last two years they will eagerly abuse any guidance they’re given to terrorise us all. They’re the ones who ultimately enforce conformity.
I have no doubt they’re waiting with bated breath to start cracking skulls.
To “condone” something means to approve of it.
I expect that you meant
“. . . Daily Hate instead of condemning it . . .”
Throughout their usual boring and repetitive report the Mail uses two lines to say that the protesters were maskless and ignored social distancing, itself a distant memory for most in the UK.
The Roundup is not generally the place for Daily Sceptic to parade outrage, it merely provides links to articles such as this that might allow you to do so in these very comments sections.
My complaint against the Mail is its stingy video bandwidth which results in videos taking ages to load just like when YouTube started with people using dial-up. Mirror Group News are just as bad.
I must have missed the video showing protesters getting mauled by police dogs, all I say was a couple of stills showing a police dog doing what police dogs do. Taking a protester down by his arm.
Anyone reading this ‘report’ from a neutral point of view would come away believing that the police were both undermanned and heavy handed but that most protesters did not seem overly concerned about it.
The people dressed in whites taking a leaf from the Wotsit Rebellion handbook; great move, very effective.
Mail comments once again overwhelmingly against lockdown/vaccines and against the use of any force by the police.
No it was excessive force, the dog a Belgian Malinois (bred specifically to be high drive, ultra confident, extremely aggressive) was holding onto a protestor’s wrist, stopping the protestor running away (yes he was trying to get away, not being violent) whilst other dogs stopped other protestors helping while police were beating the protestor to the floor with battens. There was NO justification for that level of violence, the protestor wasn’t acting aggressively at that point. There will of course be no accountability, excuses will be made & the police will simply defend their violence as reasonable.
I dare say you are correct but stopping people from running away (bank robbers car thieves and muggers usually) is precisely what Police dogs are trained to do so the question is why were they deployed in the first place ? (Rhetorical of course).
I have a Malinois lying beside me here. High drive, yes. Ultra confident from time to time. Extremely aggressive, absolutely not. They are trained to be like that, not bred that way.
No disrespect intended it’s not the dog but the trainer, as you probably know there are 2 types of breeders, family or working, when Malagators are bred for working it’s as police/military/protection dogs.
I’ve always had GSD’s which also have a bad reputation as aggressive because of police, we both know it’s the person that makes the dog aggressive. I’ve never had a nasty GSD.
Staffies as well – they are not aggressive unless trained to be so.
Agreed. The poor Staffies undeservedly get a bad rap because of a few moron owners.
Absolutely. I’ve always had Shepherd breeds (German, Dutch, Belgian) and never had one that was aggressive. These are powerful breeds, and any powerful breed can be trained to be dangerous.
MSN not reporting all of the facts again.
What that report does not say is that the police are not everyday police.
The Marechaussee are part of the military. The main tasks for the Marechaussee are border protection, military police, VIP close protection including the Royal Family and high-ranking government officials, airport police and security tasks.
However, on this day civil police which undertake these duties was on strike.
It is also said that there was a awful lot of threats to lives of these men and women on social media. They were expecting the worse from real anarchist who are presently high jacking what would be normal protests.
Protest, like this below. is what never make the headlines in the UK.
For the second year running the Dutch government forbid street fireworks on New year.
This was a scene in just one city. (watch the video) Everyone went to Belgium and purchased fireworks to let them off. Oh importing them from Belgium is also illegal.
There is a small button to translate the article.
https://www.omroepbrabant.nl/nieuws/4017418/vuurwerkverkopers-balen-van-knallende-jaarwisseling-welk-vuurwerkverbod
I feel sorry for the sellers of fireworks in NL. They are suffering and may not be in business much longer. There is no support for these businesses.
I would expect the people hijacking the peaceful protests are either undercover police ‘romeo squads’ or military. There has been so much coverage of the authorities instigating violence. The trouble is all MSM coverage is narrative enforcing propaganda, so the truth never reaches the wider public, this is where the Daily Sceptic could do some useful work instead of simply linking to blatant propaganda. Senior officers always have a habit of psyching up their thugs to see the public as the enemy before anything even happens.
You know what, I was coming back to add similar words
I am a little disappointed that links in the news round up are to mainly MSN.
I am lucky enough to have a command of several languages to differing levels. I have friends and relatives in mainland Europe so I am in a fortunate position to be given links to information which is not what I find here.
Unfortunately I have experienced links in other languages I have posted here going down like a lead balloon. Even if there are online translators which can be used.
The DM being “Outraged” as the actions taken against protesters in Europe still bemoan how ineffective the Britis coppers are at stopping Insulate Britain blocking the roads.
“Getting back to normal means overhauling Test and Trace and rethinking mandatory isolation, writes MP and former Public Health Minister Steve Brine in the Telegraph.” Uuummm…No! Getting back to normal MEANS getting back to NORMAL! Its the bloody hysterical testing that’s keeping this thing going! You can shove your Trap and Test, and your mandatory everything where the sun don’t shine!
Clearly Brine needs brining.
Idiot.
What sort of low grade people are still working for Track’n’Trace after nearly two years of failure,and ignominy?
Obviously there will be self employed IT/resources chancers offering their advice for ridiculous consultancy fees.
But what of the minimum wage call handlers? Many were grateful to find a job with Track’n’Trace as their own disappeared under Lockdown One; even better for those furloughed who found themselves with a double income.
But working for Track’n’Trace (or pretending to for much of their early days) must have been terrible for individual and group morale. Anyone with any Get Up And Go has surely already Got Up And Gone leaving who to man the phone lines?
Time to put this ineffective and unhappy beast out of its misery.
I hear that the cretin in charge of the ghastly farce has been given a ‘Damehood’. I presume this is a sort of restraint that is put over the heads of criminality insane women?
“Guardian pulls poll.”
I can’t stop chuckling. J K Rowling wins. What’s got in to the heads of Guardianistas? They are supposed to revile Rowling for her belief in biology.
Funny old world when Guardianistas believe 2 + 2 = 4.
Sometimes.
The online poll was probably subverted by alt-right trolls, I mean you would not trust Guardian’s core readership to vote that way, would you?
Must have been all those Trump, Brexit, Blairite racist ‘entryists’ that corrupted the Guardian poll.
The same people who voted for Boaty McBoatface instead of David Attenborough not so long ago
Hold on, isn’t Attenborough himself the Gammon Spawn of the evil British Empire?
£uckwit
I must admit to sharing the disbelief that Guardianistas would side with JKR rather than this year’s woke special interest.
Whatever the truth, it’s always fun to see the Graun trip over its own withered philosophy.
Oops!
What if the largest experiment on human beings in history is a failure?
” “Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64”. This headline is a nuclear truth bomb masquerading as an insurance agent’s dry manila envelope full of actuarial tables.
…
“The head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica said the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people.
“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”
OneAmerica is a $100 billion insurance company that has had its headquarters in Indianapolis since 1877. The company has approximately 2,400 employees and sells life insurance, including group life insurance to employers in the state.
Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.
“And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic,” he said.
“Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.””
So, what is driving this unprecedented surge in all-cause mortality?
“Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths,
Davison said.“What the data is showing to us is that the deaths that are being reported as COVID deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic. It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.””
Note that this fellow (Davison) has too well developed a sense of self preservation to say what this really means – that the increased deaths are not caused by “the pandemic”, but by the response to the pandemic. This euphemism is routinely used to push all the blame away from the perpetrators.
I genuinely believe – ex insurance industry – this is where the problems / excuses are going to start.
Once the actuaries realise there is a problem this will filter through all aspects of personal insurance. How soon before insurance companies request jab status, number of jabs, name of company providing jab, informed consent? This will get messy.
And when the actuaries get involved it gets tight. Premiums will rocket, personal medicals might be required, doctor’s reports ( ‘doctor’ no longer merits a capital ‘d.’) will all add to costs. Motor insurance – yep. For however much longer personal motors are allowed.
Sports insurance; Pro and amateurs buy sports insurance and you can bet a wage premiums are being adjusted as I type given the fatalities.
Travel insurance – a bloody nightmare with red blue, black, green lists.
I would bet a month’s income the Davos Deviants have missed this.
Short of cover ups with mountains of cash this is a big problem.
An iceberg of Titanic proportions.
“Cover ups with mountains of cash” will most certainly be used – after all it’s worked well so far, and unlike reasonable health policies cash is easy to produce and costs nothing (to the producer, that is).
It was government actuaries that identified Harold Shipman as a mass murderer, not fellow medics or the Police; they also identified grossly excess death rates at North(?) Staffordshire Hospital some years ago.
For reasons like these they got shut down.
And remember that Shipman was only prosecuted for a subset of his total number of offences – I don’t think they really knew the total in the end. If Shipman was still at large, they’d all have died of COVID-19! They wouldn’t notice the outbreak in his area, after all.
wonder how long it will be before the first jabbed car accident happens [if it hasn’t already done so] where jabee has stroke / myocarditis attack at wheel with hideous consequences not just for himself but also for other drivers and pedestrians?
Exactly and such a death will occur, which was the point I was making re premiums.
“Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as Covid19 deaths”.
That and the following paragraph in the articlec struck me as odd. Is he blaming the 40% increase in deaths of working people on Covid or not?
As you say Mark, he might appear to be but no he isn’t.
The rest of the article makes it clear that the author puts the blame firmly on the vaccines themselves. Not have failed to save people from Covid but the vaccines have themselves caused greater mortality..
Not that this will surprise many within the DS community but it’s good to see the leaders of Americas dry and dusty world of life insurance paying attention at last.
Bare in mind that we are still, just, within the usual 18 months-two years that it takes a virus to wear itself out which might account for the timing of this report.
As a follow up to that story, there’s an interview with the insurance man concerned where he suggests that in response they are putting up their premiums in counties with low vaccination rates!
“most of us in the industry are starting to target and to add premium loads onto employers that are based in counties that have low vaccination rates. It’s just typically what you would do for underwriting when you have a risk factor like that.”
That is quite incredible. Either they’re misallocating their premium increases, through incompetence or corruption, or somehow they are saying that this disease is causing massively increased illness and death in the working population, which would be as far as I’m aware, unprecedented as an impact of this disease.
Disturbing either way, frankly.
Life Insurance CEO Says Deaths Up 40% Among Those Aged 18-64
Article by John Harris at the Guardian arguing that the unvaxxed need understanding and sympathy ( *not* judgement …. ) because the reason why the vast majority of ( the inconveniently large number of ) us ( who can’t all be neo-nazi/alt right fanatical anti-vax “deplorables” ) are unvaxxed is because we are poor, don’t speak/read English, don’t have the Internet or mobile phones, are under terrible pressures caused by lockdowns and school closures, aren’t registered with GPs, have no fixed address, ( travellers are mentioned ), and/or don’t understand/grasp the issues, are misinformed, etc.
Obviously “they”/we must be “helped” to understand the issues, must be found/approached and educated!
Substantial resources, and “understanding”, must be directed to the complex but essential and urgent process of “helping” the unvaxxed in all their ignorance, underclassness/exclusion and sad state of vax-deprivation …..
We are clearly in need of help, poor ignorant/unenlightened creatures that we are, in need of more govt attention.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/02/understanding-not-judgement-unjabbed-uk-vaccination-gap
Sorry for the personal details, but … I am moderately well off, have worked as a copy editor correcting the shoddy English of academics, have a dumbphone because I’m too smart to have a smartphone, have used the internet since the days when it took several minutes to load a page via a modem, own my own house and live in it, would be registered with a GP if the appalling Welsh NHS had provided my town with one, have an excellent grasp of the issues, and have no personal connection with any school, closed or open.
They did get one thing right. Lockdown put me under immense pressure. If
it hadn’t done I would have known I was subhuman.
Maybe I’m the exception that proves the rule, eh?
Now, Grauniad trolls, by all means approach me. I’ll be waiting.
Yes, you’re obviously extremely unusual! Not!
I hope that despite certain elements in your comment you did understand that I think that the article’s attitude is highly obnoxious? Patronising and do-gooderish and ( despite his claiming otherwise ) based on an uncompromising/black and white judgement of both vaccines and of the unvaxxed.
Gawd, yes, I was agreeing totally with your approach!
The Graun has a fixed approach to sceptics, always making out that they are stupid and uneducated. It’s blatant snobbery. Any Graun who has occasional qualms about his or her abject cowardice is encouraged to think that abject cowardice is the infallible mark of the Very Superior Person.
Your original ironic intent was both clear and amusing, as was Annie’s response.
I’m a sourdough.
Very similar to you Annie except that I do have a smartphone because I don’t want my PC connected to the internet and like my usage to be mobile.
While far from wealthy I have more money than I need which allows me to access the information that I do need.
I’ve lived at the same address for fifteen years which is not in a racially defined ghetto.
Above average education with a 2/1 (Hons) dating back to when that meant more than mediocre as it does today.
Always like to regard myself as well informed about subjects that interest me (including by sheer coincidence- epidemiology) for which reason I’ve had to give up reading print media altogether as they are so full of misinformation.
I’m not even anti-vax having allowed the first two for reasons that no longer apply and so won’t be getting boosted.
I have a very good grasp of English and used to be extremely well read sometimes buying several books a week until computers came along.
While right of centre I am far from being a nazi and exhibit some anarchic tendencies on occasion.
I’m registered with my local GP Practice where I have access to numerous GPs other than ‘my own’. Like yourself I have no links with any school but was hardly affected by Lockdown itself for reasons I’ve outlined many times.
I’ve never thought of myself as a candidate for Guardian Victim Status so now I don’t suppose I ever will be.
Likewise. I’m a university lecturer in a STEM field, own my own home and have enough to be quite comfortable. I have been on the internet since early 1993. I am registered with a GP, but will be giving them a wide berth if they keep touting the vaccine. Lockdown put me under considerable pressure, particularly as loved ones were dying in hospital and I was not permitted to travel or to visit them. Harris can keep his silly theorising. I won’t be changing my mind unless presented with highly credible and verifiable evidence that convinces me to do so.
Ignorance is the reason I’m an anti-vaxxer;
Brilliant!
This is meme worthy. May I?
That sort of ignorance is positively Socratic. Socrates said that his sole claim to intellectual superiority was that he, unlike his rivals, knew that he knew nothing.
,• the pushers also gained themselves legal/financial indemnity should their vaccines fail to work or fuck you up.
I don’t fit the guardian description either. And I am an anti vaxxer because no one has explained to me why natural immunity is being dismissed; why young people and children need this vax; why unvaccinated care workers have been dismissed from their jobs and health workers soon will be when the vax does not stop transmission.
Ironically, despite their incessant bleating on the subject, lefties really don’t understand people at all. They see everything through the prism of their ideology, hence their unshakeable belief that they have all the answers, and their wish to impose them.
Which is why the left get so confused when they lose. They believe too much in their own ideology and propaganda.
The Guardian has done untold damage to the fabric of Western society – they are the ‘nice’ cuddly liberals who promulgate intolerance and hatred, division and discord. I wish to God it had died a few years ago when it was leaking money. Unfortunately, it was propped up by the Scott Trust and is now in the black. The Bible for the new generation of pronoun-policing kidults outraged at ‘micro-agressions’ against…[insert acceptable persecuted minority of choice] committed by ‘fascists’ and ‘Tories’. Ironically, yet unsurprisingly, many of them also think Tony Blair was a good idea and deserved his UK knighthood. Hate GMG and everything it stands for.
Not aware of this site, nor of the American Ph.D. study then.
Permitted myself a wry smile at ‘comment is free’ in the URL. It certainly isn’t on The Guardian website above and BTL. Besides which, the only comments that are allowed carry a heavy cost as these poorly educated Liberal know-nothings whip each other up into ever higher paroxysms of a self-righteous fury and ardor.
The comments on Guardian YouTube can often be counter to their usual way of thinking. Perhaps their censor is lazy, I sometimes go there early a.m.
I see that the ‘90% unvaxxed’ claim gets another outing! Persisting with that does rather indicate desperation on the part of the vaxophiles.
Shame about Harris. He used to be one of their few decent writers. Now he’s gone full Graun.
After Drumming Out Unvaxxed Servicemembers, Fully Vaccinated and Boosted Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin Tests Positive for COVID.
Karma drops a big steaming pile right where it belongs.
Now comes the part…
Just need a visit from Bob.
Brilliant!
ITEM: “The Pandemic Endgame” – An international update from the ‘Swiss Doctor’, including …… Australia’s sky-rocketing Omicron outbreak.
The Swiss Doctor is being alarmist. It is not “Omicron infection rates” in Australia which have gone vertical but the number of tests which have gone up like a sky-rocket. We have just re-opened our internal, state borders (after two friggin’ years) and half of Australia wants to travel. Now, because all travellers (the double-jabbed only, of course, as their reward for compliance) require a negative test pre-travel and post-travel (so much for the vaccines as vaccines!), the PCR-testing centres and RAT-LFT sellers are doing a roaring trade, resulting in the number of (meaningless) positive tests, rather than (actual) infections per se, heading towards the ceiling. It’s the testdemic, all over again.
Even though the positives are as likely to be false positives of DNA-remnant old infections of influenza (remember how the flu magically disappeared when the PCR test came on the scene?), or some other coronavirus, as of any actual SARS-CoV-2 virus (the tests are a complete statistical crapshoot), the ‘experts’ believe in their lines on their charts and are easily alarmed by statistical artefacts that bear no relation to any reality of an Omicron ‘pandemic’.
It is also not true that Australia has “almost no natural immunity” and is, therefore “seeing less of a decoupling between infections, hospitalizations and ICU patients than Britain and South Africa”. Our international border closures were too late to have made any difference to infection rates way back in 2019/2020, and now that our external borders are open, the double-jabbed arrivals are bringing more virus in with them (because the vaccines don’t work, of course). After over two years of mostly silent infections (the virus is a nothingburger to most people), kept artificially low at the beginning only because we copped the first ‘wave’ in our virus-hostile summer, there is plenty of naturally-acquired immunity. The hospitalisations and ICU-use appear to be Omicron-caused only because we are back in “with Covid” vs “from Covid” territory again, again measured by bogus tests.
Nevertheless, I’m rooting for many more ‘Omicron cases’ because this variant (as any competent virologist could tell you about antigenic drift) isn’t the destroyer of worlds – it is so mild-mannered that it should bring down the curtain on the whole hysteria (if this was a reasonable country where people’s thinking hadn’t been fried by fear and by scary but rubbish lines on Excel spreadsheets).
We’ve got three Omicronics here in Perth. I’ve made out my will and told the neighbours they can help themselves to the mangoes in the backyard when they’re ripe.
The government and their media mouthpieces wouldn’t be lying to me, would they?
I’ll bet they’ve gone very silent about the corpse count, just as our Fascists have here?
The case numbers always make the news reports and front pages. Actual dead are tucked in at the back like an afterthought.
Typical example here of the official output.
Yeah – MSM in UK obsessed by testing and “case” numbers [cases of what???]
What Omnicon destroyed here in the UK was the slightly dangerous Delta variant, something you might expect the safety fanatics to be celebrating but they aren’t.
12 months ago we were at the height of Kent Kalamity but that just faded away when nobody was looking.
Looking at the news articles here and catching a bit of the news on the radio it seems to me that much of the developed world is caught up in a mad hysterical whirl of self induced, sado masochism and self flagellation as we beat ourselves up over an irrelevant disease and a unnecessary climate panic.
There seem to be no leaders and no mechanism to get the world to stop and take a look at itself. Covid is now a mad system of tests and test results almost totally divorced from any link with human health. The climate change stuff is forcing us all to try and do everything via an electric supply system that cannot cope and will probably end up having to generate electric using the gas we are no longer allowed to burn in our boilers.
We seem to have done what humans have done over the centuries and constructed huge edificies on fundamentally basic false premises. It seems to take a war, a natural disaster or an outstanding leader of tremendous stature and vision to take us out of these mad human constructs. Sadly, at the present time, I see little sign of a suitable visionary leader coming forward to end this.
During my recent 10 day stay in an NHS hospital I sometimes caught BBC Breakfast .
Every single day has to start with Covid related news even if there isn’t any.
The day after bozo didn’t increase restrictions for New Years Eve they spent an hour hosting various experts telling us that Boris “hadn’t done anything”. Ye Gods.
Did you sue the NHS for negligence?
Self inflicted, couldn’t be bothered to turn it off. The first time I sort of enjoyed it as a horror show.
A quick plea to all parents of secondary school children. Please explain optional exemption to masks to your children and inform the school office that your child will not be wearing one. As far as I can see, the exemption does not need to be explained. Causing distress would seem to be sufficient if “challenged”…however this should not happen.
I want my child to learn in a fun environment…which is safer without face nappies.
We need to do this together.
Apropos of absolutely nothing in the foregoing News Round-Up, ladies and gentlemen*, allow me to introduce you, should you not have already made his acquaintance, to Mr. Reagan (no, not the former president – his YouTube channel has been rather lacking in content these past few years) and your first, well-deserved chuckle of the day:
“Placebo”
*…am I still allowed to use that term, or should I expect a howling mob outside my door for so mis-speaking?
very funny!
Sad thing is if you were to show it to normies they’d be wanting to know where they could get some
That’s good! Sharing.