Douglas Murray has written a good column for the Telegraph about the obsession the New York Times has with bashing Britain – and the paper’s reaction to the Queen’s death is a prime example. It begins:
At times of sorrow, you learn who your friends are. You can also learn who they are not. The outpouring of grief and affection for the late Queen is everywhere in America. On the news of her death, the President and Speaker of the House ordered flags on federal buildings to be lowered to half-mast. Television networks have sombre wall-to-wall coverage. And every living president has paid magnificent tribute to a monarch they admired, revered and clearly loved.
But there are exceptions. One is the newspaper that used to be called the US “paper of record”: the New York Times.
In the last six years, the NYT has developed a strange and intense loathing of Britain. There is no writer so obscure that they cannot be drafted in so long as they are going to bash Britain.
In 2018, the paper brought in an author to claim (on the basis of a brief trip to Lancashire) that Britain was an austerity-reduced wasteland in the process of shutting down. It was filled with so many factual inaccuracies that it should ordinarily never have been published, or if published should have been withdrawn. But the paper of record did not mind. The author ended up saying that although his facts may be wrong his “perception” was correct.
That same year, the paper ran a culinary review which claimed that the people of Britain until recently survived on boiled mutton and oatmeal. By December of 2018, the NYT was asking people to submit stories to the paper if they had “experienced a petty crime in London”. Given the crime rates – not least the murder rates – in New York, it seemed an odd obsession to have.
But the fact is that ever since 2016 the NYT has seen our country as the enemy of its own brand of liberal internationalism. Its understanding of the U.K. is so paper-thin that it connected the Brexit vote with the election that same year of Donald Trump.
In 2019 it recruited a little known novelist to write a piece titled “Britain is drowning itself in nostalgia”. The author claimed that the country was “poisoned” with “colonial arrogance” and “dreamy jingoism”. Another piece accused Britain of having a “racist heart”. Earlier this week, it used Liz Truss’s arrival in No 10 to attack both her and Margaret Thatcher. And it also published a bizarre new video from an unfunny satirist it has employed whose previous employer was Russia Today.
And now, on the death of the Queen, how did the NYT choose to respond? By immediately going to a grievance studies professor to write a piece attacking her. The author – one Maya Jasanoff – said: “We should not romanticise her era” and claimed that “the Queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonisation whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged”. Because, of course, within hours of the news of the death of the monarch, who does not want to bang on about decolonisation?
Worth reading in full.
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We can shout it from the rooftops, but no-one hears us…
In the UK we have the monumental challenge that our response to all this is set by the climate change act. To get any sort of change in our net-zero response will mean that the Climate Change Act needs to be rescinded or radically amended, that is a huge ask in the current febrile atmosphere surrounding climate change. It will not be pleasant but IMO whet the UK needs now is a very cold winter, with a shortage of heating oil, gas, petrol and diesel and a series of disruptive power cuts.
I feel it needs a serious hit if people are going to wake up and push back against sleep walking into net-zero immiseration.
There are plenty of other Acts which are flouted every day – free speech, anyone? – so I don’t see the need to stick so rigidly to the CCA, other than the usual nefarious financial incentives, of course.
Those with their noses in the climate trough will demand we stick rigidly with the CCA and the ‘legally binding’ targets, but won’t give two hoots to free speech as that’s exactly what they fear. They don’t want the truth coming out.
Those with a reasonable memory will remember the winters after the last warming periods of 1983, 1987, 1989, 2010, cold is a mild description.
Going further back it was snowing when I was born in early May 1947 and a friend and I rode our bikes across a frozen River Thames at Hampton Court in the winter of 1963.
Since Net Zero was waved through parliament with no questions asked it is unlikely that climate policies will be reversed. But a severe dose of reality might do the trick and eventually give the eco socialists no choice. When the astronomical cost and the missing technology required for this absurdity eventually slaps them in the face and the public see their freedoms vanish and their standard of living plummet let us see who it is that backs down. Politicians ride along on the wind. But winds turn, and when that wind is blowing full in your face and it seems you are like the “Bounty” trying to navigate around Cape Horn, then it isn’t a “delightful passage”. Just as Captain Bligh had to order the crew of the Bounty to make way for the Cape of Good Hope, so too might the government reverse course.
People like Curry have opened up their mouths way too late.
Therefore and now, the racket could get itself firmly established and morph into The Big Cult.
And one simply cannot reason with cult members.
Cults can and will only end in and with a catastrophe, as they become ever more absurd and harmful.
Judith Curry has been speaking about this stuff for many years. You have to also remember that there is big pressure from the Pretend to Save the Planet establishment that manufactured the “consensus”, and the likes of Curry have all the time to fight this rearguard action against the powerful forces of “Sustainable Development” Politics.
There is no climate crisis.
$cientism is not real science.
$cientism is the religion of the corrupt, bribed, deluded and evil as was Rona.
What the average person gets from it I have no idea. Maybe the warm feeling of belonging to the Church of the Corrupted $cience.
The “scientists” get a lot of research money.- that is the main driver of the scam.
Indeed. Who gives these scientists this “research” money, and why? It’s a bit like “covid” – the politicians say they are following the science but the scientists seem to be controlled or influenced by the state. Whose hand is up whose backside?
And unbelievably, the actual churches support this scam.
I note that ongoing geoengineering activity isn’t included in Dr Curry’s assessment, that must be having an effect too. They’ve been at it 24/7 for days around here again, really effing annoying.
If you want to get your own way in an argument or discussion you highlight only the bits of information that would seem to indicate that what you say is all ultimate truth. You never mention uncertainties or any facts or pieces of information that don’t support your argument. It is a bit like that old TV quiz show from the 70’s “Call My Bluff”, where contestants would read out different meanings of words in a way that would convince others that theirs was the true meaning and other contestants had to choose which was the correct version. ———In the climate change argument, proponents of global warming do exactly the same thing. The only difference is that in the TV quiz show the contestants knew it was only a game. But in the climate wars, it is much more than a game. It is a war. It is a war on an unsuspecting public who if they are to have their cars, their flights, and their central heating taken away, and their standard of living lowered, would prefer to have it done based on what is true, not on what may only be a smidgeon of the truth.— The self appointed providers of truth at the IPCC make statements of certainty where there are none. They do so because they want to win the particular argument that humans are causing dangerous changes to climate. But although you never know it from watching mainstream media like BBC and SKY news, there are very many scientists calling their bluff. One of those is Judith Curry and her recent book “Climate Uncertainty and Risk” calls it very well. ——“Climate Change” is not the black and white issue that UN Bureaucrats standing at a podium would have us all believe. There is HUGE uncertainty. So when the UN IPCC say “Doubt has been eliminated” they are calling our Bluff.
The Fascists pushing the “Climate Crisis” narrative in the UN, WEF, EU, USA and UK aren’t interested in FACTS or debate.
Any opinion or commentary which does not fit the views of the political elite are routinely dismissed or suppressed. This applies on technical issues as well as political ones.
That of course does not disprove climate change, but it does add some very important nuance to the mix.
Climate has always changed.
Always will.
Just be glad that virtually every change in a Generation has been beneficial.
And bugger all to do with fossil fuels.
A good summary, Chris.
Well done.
Then there is this:
“14 American cities have set a “target” to comply with the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) green agenda goals by banning meat, dairy, and private car ownership by 2030.”
The U.S. cities have formed a coalition called the “C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group” (C40). The C40 has established an “ambitious target” to meet the WEF’s goals by the year 2030. To fulfill the “target,” the C40 Cities have pledged that their residents will comply with the following list of mandatory rules:
“0 kg [of] meat consumption”
“0 kg [of] dairy consumption”
“3 new clothing items per person per year”
“0 private vehicles” owned
“1 short-haul return flight (less than 1500 km) every 3 years per person”
The C40 Cities’ dystopian goals can be found in its “The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World” report.
https://slaynews.com/news/14-us-cities-ban-meat-dairy-private-cars-2030/
I think that Mayor Khan in London is a member of this ‘C40 Cities Gang’ so Londoners should expect yet more ‘stuff’ along these lines from him.