To mark the second anniversary of the first lockdown, we’re publishing a guest post by Dr. David McGrogan, an Associate Professor at Northumbria Law School, about the moral vacuum at the heart of Britain that was laid bear by our willingness to sacrifice everything, including the young, for our own safety.
When I sat down to write a piece reflecting on the second anniversary of the March 2020 lockdown, I initially thought it would be about what the past two years have taught us about law, civil liberties, and the state. Instead, I’d like to talk about the thing that has occupied my mind most ever since Boris’s famous press conference shortly before the lockdown was given legal effect: namely, the nihilism of modern life. This is illustrated perfectly by the way in which the interests of children were treated during the pandemic.
Nihilism has often been described with a simple phrase, supposedly uttered by Madame de Pompadour, the lover of Louis XV, on seeing his disappointment after the French defeat at Rossbach in 1757. To cheer him up, she laughed off the defeat by reassuring him: “Après nous, le déluge” (“After us, the flood”). What she is commonly thought to have meant by this was that any catastrophe or disaster occurring after one is dead is completely irrelevant to one’s happiness. One might as well enjoy one’s life, safe in the knowledge that whatever comes afterwards has no consequence.
“Après nous, le déluge” should have been the motto of the past two years. As long as one was “safe” and able to enjoy one’s splendid isolation with one’s gin, one’s tonic, one’s Netflix, one’s Amazon Prime account and one’s lockdown puppy, what consequence was it that government debt was skyrocketing to 103.7% of GDP? What consequence was it that quantitative easing would inevitably lead to eye-watering levels of inflation? What consequence was it that a generation of children were not just being denied schooling, but were being inducted into a world of addiction and vice by being babysat by screens for days at a time? What consequence was it that our young people, and their children, and their children’s children, would likely have to deal with the fallout from all of this for their entire lives?
The blitheness with which these issues have been treated over the past two years puts one in mind of Edmund Burke’s famous warning, that the “possessors” of a “commonwealth”, “unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity”, might “commit waste on the inheritance” of the young. Apart from being bad in itself (passing on society’s wealth to the young is one of the most important duties of adults), this would have the even worse effect of teaching the younger generations the same bad habits, to the ultimate ruination of the “commonwealth” itself. Burke’s warning has been ignored for decades, but the experience of lockdown confirmed its horrible predictive power – it is bad enough that we spend £60 billion a year (which could be spent, for example, on education) merely on servicing debt, and that inflation will soon approach 10% (meaning that savers will lose a tenth of the value of their children’s inheritance in a single year). But what is truly terrifying is that most of the adult population of the country do not seem to care, and certainly have no interest in teaching to children the message that the nation’s wealth is a valuable inheritance that they are to steward, and pass on to their own children in turn. And that’s just the economic side of life: what can one say about a society which sees nothing wrong in forcing children to stay at home for months, without meeting or playing with other children, and inflicting great mental harm as a result – merely to make adults feel safe? It is a society shorn of loyalty to anything larger or longer-lasting than the immediate physical existence of its members; a society comprised of individuals in the truest sense, thinking only of their own health and in signalling their own virtue in purportedly ‘protecting others’.
This overriding sense of nihilism – that nothing matters after one’s own “bare life” is over, and certainly not the future of our children – cannot of course be attributed to lockdowns themselves. The response to Covid is a symptom of a profound malaise. Burke aptly described the inhabitants of his ruined “commonwealth” as “little better than the flies of a summer” – leading meaningless, acultural, disconnected and atomised lives, with no interest in what came before them or what was going to follow, and no loyalty to lasting values or the notion of a culture passed down from one generation to the next. The fact that so few people saw fit to think through the consequences of all this for future generations indicates how far along the path to fly-like lives so many of us have gone, and how difficult it will be to reverse course.
I do not claim to know what the ‘best’ government response to the pandemic would have been. Reasonable people can disagree about this measure or that. But a healthy society would have considered the wider ramifications of the vast expenditure and social disruption that lockdowns and associated restrictions caused, and the impact on the young. It would have considered the consequences for our society’s future, and not merely the immediate preservation of the health of adults. The fact that it didn’t, and still won’t (the Covid inquiry, as it stands, will apparently have little or nothing specific to say about the effect of lockdowns on children) speaks of a deep sickness in our social foundations – and it will take a lot more to recover from that disease than will the path back to normality from Covid.
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This, dear friends, is the next battleground.
Remember it’s people like you who spread the word of the covid madness. The crazy lockdowns. The fact masks don’t work. The fact Covid is age stratifying and goes after fatties.
Now you need to bring to the dinner table the FACTS on climate change. Don’t let your greeny nephew at 6th form shout you down.
Get your facts straight..
Get your armour on…
Get ready foor the fight!
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Ep. 51 BANNED FROM TWITTER (Find out why)
We’ve been banned from Twitter for a week…find out why! Plus we talk Canada and Justin Trudeau, your first ‘Listener Rant’, Climate change madness, University PHD’s gone mad, Scotland’s gone crazy, The return of the Big Breakfast and MUCH MORE!
https://therealnormalpodcast.buzzsprout.com/1268768/11142910-ep-51-banned-from-twitter-find-out-why
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Thanks Bill. Should have recorded on Saturday morning but Syfret was at a wedding. Next episode out next Tuesday!
The notion that earth’s climate is dictated by 0.04% of it’s atmosphere which is co2, of which human emissions are a tiny fraction of the 0.04% has to be the most preposterous idea even inflicted. Marxists like Monbiot use the fear mongering to further push their hard left agenda, supposedly conservative governments then do their bidding banning cars and abolishing choice in the energy market. We need to get back burning coal ASAP!
Spot on!
To paraphrase Prof Ian Plumber (a geologist), in order to blame climate change on the 3 percent of CO2 emissions caused by human activity, we also need to explain why the 97 percent CO2 release from natural processes are not responsible.
Do you mean the Australian geology professor Ian Plimer? Autocorrecting keyboard?!!
There is at least 400 years of coal reserves beneath our feet. Add in the shale gas, natural gas, North Sea oil, top up with nuclear and we become exporters.
And yet we are expected to destroy ourselves by leaving all this in the ground.
And now that other trace gas methane is being demonised to ban agriculture.
Yes. The “Great Moonbat” (as the late, great Christopher Booker called him) featured on Mark Steyn’s GB News show (yesterday?) saying that meat and dairy farming needs to stop. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised about the acceptance by many of the preposterous CO2 notion, after all, a surprising amount of people believe in homeopathy.
Just to put it into perspective, does anyone know the details of the extent of the current UK restrictions and taxes on coal production at the moment – and the value of goods we nonetheless import from the coal dependent PRC? Utter madness.
“…a surprising amount of people believe in homeopathy.”
The pharmacological era only really took off about about 100 years ago and was pushed, and pushed by surprise, surprise, the Rockefellers. Within about twenty years from 1900 or so they managed to wipe out, certainly in the USA, the folk medicine developed over thousands of years. And now they have turned medicine against the people.
Homeopathy belongs, it is accumulated wisdom. Look where the test tube concoctions have brought us – Bioweapons.
Can we use Monbiot as a firelighter?
This guy works through just what it would take to make the switch from current energy sources to renewables. While listening it becomes obvious that no one has bothered to do the calculations before. The scale of mining required to source copper, nickel, lithium etc is mind blowing (796) Assoc Prof Simon Michaux – The quantity of metals required to manufacture just one generation of… – YouTube
It must be infuriating for real scientists to watch the sponges lap up the words of the Climate Schoolgirl, a magnificent advertising Coup. Those who have spent a lifetime of indulgence are now insisting we must deliberately trash our own lives, trash all the advantages of the modern age which has actually saved billions from starvation. Net zero and returning us to the era of our ancestors is not the way to go.
As with most things, their demands that we renounce everything would hold more water if they lead the way…
That’s for the peasants not for the kings.
Net zero is just Marxism in brides clothing, same result.
..you might enjoy this..
https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/andrew-bolt/obsessed-with-doom-greta-thunberg-has-gone-bust/video/126e6eb2bb418caa34bbfbf861cd7007
Sky News host Andrew Bolt says the Greta Thunberg cult has “gone bust”.
“A mere child, full of rage, obsessed with doom, totally devoid of any practical solutions – but here she was lecturing the world on how to fuel their 21st century economies,” Mr Bolt said.
“Thunberg is now a victim of her own success in scaring people into doing very, very stupid things that we’re now paying for.”
Will never forget UK politicians gaping in wonder when she stood berating them….
It amazed me when she made her “how dare you mortgage our future” speech last year that nobody in the audience responded along the lines of “Yes, how dare we increase life expectancy, reduce childhood mortality and raise the living standards of billions of people”
If George Monbiot were dried out, seasoned and stored properly, he could keep a family warm for a good week.
Yes but the fumes would be unendurable.
Monbiot is a particularly vile element of the climate cultists. A useful idiot with typical extreme Marxist viewpoints garnered from his middle class roots in student activism; caviar Marxist.
Much like Tony Blair, he’s a weather vane on policies. If he supports it, you know it will be terrible.
Unfortunately, Guardianites think he’s amazing, kind of like those odd people who worship that toad James O’Brian on LBC.
The parallels with the Covid debate are amazing. Opposition to the globalist narratives will be shouted down by the moron Woke brigade, policies will be fatal to society especially those on the lower end, enrich the lizard people at the top, be supported by the MSM, secondary effects will be blamed on some other reason.
The end result, more crisis, more totalitarianism.
Spot on.
I’m not too sure how Monbiot manages to find time to work in between his appointments with his psychiatrist.
If friends query it…for example a friend (with young son at university) stated in a message to me that coral bleaching is a phenomenon of climate change. Instead of just ignoring this sort of thing, I now send back a polite email attaching a link to the recent Australian report here: https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-condition-summary-2021-22 referencing the massive regrowth of corals on the Great Barrier Reef in recent years.
Here is some of what I say: “There are plenty of other factors, weather events such as El Nino for example, that have contributed to coral bleaching. It has even been shown that rat populations on islands (Chagos) can have a huge impact on the quality of coral reefs and their fish populations. Yet we have the hubris to think that we can control these things.
I reckon the corals will be around long after the human race has disappeared off the face of this planet. Look at Bikini Atoll for example. Bombed to hell in the 40s/50s and yet now has a thriving coral reef that really amazed scientists. https://www.livescience.com/2438-bikini-atoll-corals-recovering-atomic-blast.html ” (End quote)
This is the only way to get to these people. Facts in the face of religion. Thanks Toby for providing the facts to help us non-believers (climate deniers – what a rubbish term) fight back against these sadly misled folk. Monbiot is a side show and is more of a danger to himself than the rest of us but heaven help us if he ever gets into a position of power.
I agree with you, but I get very tired of the little sighs, the averted eyes and the change of subject that often ensues – it’s like being treated as a child or someone with limited capacity.
I think climate change ideology is in a particularly febrile state because the pushers of the ideology have realised they can take advantage of the same drone-like idiots that served as the useful idiots of the corona virus panic.
They are the collectivists in our society, driven by a compulsion to tell others how they must live their lives, a compulsion they mask with claims that they only want what is best for everyone and that it can only be achieved if everyone pulls together.
The drones are like a machine that has been fired up and is running on a high gear, fueled by covid fear. And with the covid fuel dying out the climate fanatics are only too happy to take over the machine and feed it with climate catastrophe fear.
Carbon DIOXIDE (not that dirty black stuff ‘carbon’ as the Greenies would have it) is plant food. The more CO2 in our atmosphere, the more abundantly our planet’s flora will grow.
The poly-tunnels in Spain are pumped full of the stuff to increase yields of the tomatoes we import.
The basis for Net Zero is entirely Malthusian with the simple goal to to reduce the human population so that the elite predator class can enjoy the planet to themselves. AI and robotics have replaced manual labour so rapidly that the vast majority of humanity will no longer have a purposeful existence. Our fate will be that of the equine population when car and train usage became widespread, we are to be put out to pasture and discouraged from breeding.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/08/22/europes-population-halve-surging-house-prices-force-couples/
Climies can’t speak in whole molecules.
The opinion that the world is overpopulated and would be better off with fewer people is extremely common. Anyone can see it from their own conversations.
It would be delusional to think that amongst all those that believe that there are too many of us, there aren’t plenty who would act on the idea if they could.
And it would be wishful thinking to expect that amongst those that would act on it there aren’t any that actually can.
In short, it’s not only possible but extremely likely that there are those that are actively working towards depopulating the planet. The extent to which they can succeed or not is a different matter.
Not conspiracy theory, just plain logical deduction.
From there looking at how they would go about it is a small step. The “climate crisis”? Definitely a candidate.
An excellent article.
Monobot? Not worth mentioning even in passing. Complete Nutter.
Were Lysenko alive today, he wouldn’t dismiss statistics and the scientific method as tools of his enemies – he would take a social sciences course at some third-rate university where he would be coached in how to cherry pick data that supported his ideas; which statistical processing algorithms to use regardless of their validity, to give the appearance of credibility without any of the substance. Besides this, the parallels between the destruction and politicisation of science in Lysenkoism and the rise of the climate cult are so striking as to rightly be considered more as a repeat of history.
Political ideologues have always needed to spin their own ‘truth’ in the form of a narrative, in order to protect their fragile, simplistic answers from the sobering complexity of reality. The Soviet elites didn’t even need – or probably want – to understand Lysenko’s nonsense theory. All that mattered was that he told them what they wanted to hear – that human nature can be quickly and easily reshaped; that mankind has the power to command nature on a whim (a great way to stem incompetence-caused famine).
Of course, the climate cult haven’t yet been able to report academics who fail into line for execution or a trip to the gulag, though in the USSR, totalitarianism was already in full swing, whereas today it remains a firm goal for our eager Lysenkoists. It isn’t hard to imagine Extinction Rebellion activists in increasingly scuzzy (thanks to them) parts of Oxford and Bristol as the next boneheaded little pampered commissars following the Great Reset, enthusiastically denouncing traitors and dissenters. The purging of dissent in scientific journals and academia through bullying, insult, smear, gaslighting, insinuation leading to the loss of career for anyone unretired or without tenure who dares speak out or ask questions is just the same though. Even in the the case of tenure, who wants to be an honest professor if it means being labelled a pariah and branded ‘far right’ in a leftist world?
It’s heartening to see some stand up for the truth and for integrity as reported here. No doubt there are thousands more academics and scientists silently waiting in the wings who are starting to feel ‘climate science’ is nothing more than an ugly, hastily sewn together corpse of the scientific method, twitching on strings held by activists and billionaires (or a ‘cargo cult’ as Richard Feynman better put it). I hope it helps gives them the courage to investigate claims for themselves rather than rely on the groupthink of ‘consensus’ for safety, and allows them to sleep better at night knowing there is some integrity left in their field. Hopefully before the most successful civilisation in history is extinguished under the shadow of regressive totalitarianism, they might have the courage to stand up as heroes themselves.
Well said
The Great Barrier Reef Declaration…sounds familiar
The climate zealots have refused ever to debate publicly anyone who challenges their assertions. Their first line is to discount anyone who isn’t a scientist or if a scientist not a climate scientist.
When confronted with a dissenting climate scientist, their excuse is that to debate them would give them and their opposing argument credibility and create doubt in the absolute certainty of ‘climate change’ being ‘real’.
So they are frightened of debate because they know they have no evidence to support their claims, and on the contrary, evidence refutes it.
But when Western Governments, international bodies, business interests and rich and powerful are backing them, they can get away with it. Just like the whole CoVid Fakedemic and vaccine menace.
This avoiding serious challenging debate thing seems to be a pattern among certain types, especially the fanatics whose eyes burn with righteous zeal and who will shout you down again and again rather than sit quietly and talk about it. Sadly, I have a very good friend who just doesn’t want to even talk about the possibility that climate change might not be real. I’ve broached the subject a few times and he immediately gets all defensive. Not going there. Taboo subject etc. Greta Thunberg is a saint in his eyes with her ‘how dare you’ and ‘you have stolen my childhood’ rants at the UN among her highlights.
There was a meme I saw recently with all these very young children working in what were meant to be lithium mines. There were nine panels in total with a picture of child in eight of them, each armed with a shovel or a pickaxe, – they might have been mining lithium or maybe not, the point being that the ninth panel had Greta Thunberg sailing on a yacht and the caption read ‘Which of these children had their childhoods stolen?’ A powerful image especially if it was lithium, the raw material for the electric batteries that her crowd seem to be clamouring for.
“Climate Scientist” – someone who is not a scientist and who doesn’t understand climate. Someone who can spot a grant providing opportunity at 1,000 paces
Industrial Degeneration: Crippling Cost of Subsidised Wind & Solar Destroying Our Economic Future
https://stopthesethings.com/2022/08/23/industrial-degeneration-crippling-cost-of-subsidised-wind-solar-destroying-our-economic-future/
by stopthesethings
Our leaders have destroyed so many lives, but we must never be defeated.
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PLEASE download and read this incredibly concise analysis of how the climate works by a lifetime gas turbine designer, aeronautical engineer. These are the people who can actually work this stuff out because it’s fundamentally a thermodynamics problem – not a geology / oceanography / meterology problem.
Link:
https://gvigurs.wordpress.com/2019/04/28/the-emperors-new-climate/
With that in mind, thermodynamics problems are essentially expressed in terms of gas properties. So we first have to (“should”) as “what is this magical gas property that allows a gas to pass heat in one direction and not another and that defines a gas as a “greenhouse gas” ? It turns out to be “emissivity”.
But refer to Page 14 of that document (“Planetary Atmospheres”). If you read nothing else, just read page 14. It shows that, at thermal equilibrium, emissivity has no ZIP impact on the equilibrium temperture. This is why the climate is NOT warming because of Co2. Emissivity make make a small difference to the RATE at which the gas reaches that equilibrium temperature but its determines by the influx of solar radiation and the atmospheric density. Nothing to do with “greenhouse gases”.
See PAGE 14.
“climate science, the whore of politics.” about sums it up.
With science being completely and utterly trashed over the last 2.5 years by globalists shills and greed, it’s encouraging to hear real scientists starting to shout from the roof tops about this climate hoax. Hopefully, a win for common sense here, they will be able to restore the reputation of real scientists.
“In the U.K., the spike in international gas prices, and an increasing reliance on unreliable renewables, means the consumer energy price cap could be raised to £6,000”
We should not let our feelings/beliefs about climate change interfere with rational judgement.
Solar and wind are cheaper than gas, currently vastly cheaper, so the more solar and wind we have, the less expensive gas we use. The less gas we use the more stable energy costs become.
Of course we still need gas as a backup to unreliable solar and wind, and we desperately need much larger gas storage facilities to even out price fluctuations and ensure continuity of supply.
Un-reliables are not cheaper if the subsidies are subtracted.
Real life example – I paid £7000 for my solar panels in 2014, there was no subsidy on the purchase price.
My panels generate 4,500 kWh/year. If they last 20 years, which is conservative given that there has been no drop in output so far, their lifetime generation will be 90,000 kWh.
£7,000 / 90,000 kWh = 7.8p per kWh.
Solar panels, inverters etc are now cheaper than they were eight years ago.
Mine is a 4kWp domestic system, obviously it would be cheaper per kWp to install a much larger system (economies of scale) on the ground (no scaffolding).