It’s official: according the latest news, young people in particular, and the population in general, are experiencing levels of anxiety never seen before. The data suggest that this is largely a phenomenon across countries in the wealthy West, and especially where extreme Covid policies have been enacted. Here in the U.K., the SPI-B unit within SAGE has played a largely unrecognised role in using psychological techniques to shape behavioural responses during the Covid crisis. Led by SPI-B advisors, including Communist Party Member and behavioral scientist Dr. Susan Michie, Government and health policy has been nudged along by generating a climate of fear and anxiety.
Those of us who have studied anxiety extensively are fully aware of the strength of this psychological state to interfere with our thoughts and feelings. As many clinicians and eminent psychologists acknowledge, anxiety, once it takes hold, tends to take over the whole of our personality. The famous existential psychologist Rollo May noted that prolonged exposure to anxiety can, in some cases, lead to a clinical condition he referred to as neurotic anxiety. This is a form of mental illness, and one of its features is that the individual tries to avoid the experience of anxiety by choosing to restrict their own freedoms and choices. Unfortunately, this strategy usually tends to make matters worse, with the result that the sufferer becomes even more afraid of their freedom and the ability to think for themselves and make their own decisions. Such people could be described, as the philosopher-psychologist Martin Buber said in his famous book, Ich und Du (‘I and Thou’), as possessing “a stunted person centre”. By this dramatic expression he conveyed the idea that to avoid the positive anxiety of freedom, people will sometimes diminish themselves and hand over the responsibility for their choices and lives to someone else.
My applied experience with hundreds of professional athletes and other clients who work in demanding performance environments convinces me that we have an epidemic of anxiety. I believe this has been deliberately manufactured by bodies like SPI-B with the complicity of most of the mainstream media. In trying to understand what has been happening to them during these past three years, some of the people I work with are questioning whether there are reasons beyond Covid to account for this prolonged anxiety attack on our culture. Some believe that the aim has been about health, protection from Covid, and to protect the NHS. An increasing number feel that something much bigger is at stake, and that the attack on individual and community freedoms is part of a drive to change the way we live in order to satisfy the climate change agenda. Others seem confused and quite naturally want to resist any thoughts about the possibility of manipulation from governments, supra-national organisations or other forces. This lack of clarity and certainty about what is going on, about the source of their overriding anxiety, of course has the effect of elevating feelings of anxiety.
One of the features of anxiety is that it is related to uncertainty about future actions and events. Anxiety described in this way is perfectly normal and healthy, in that it goes hand in hand with our human condition of freedom. However, when great confusion exists, most especially if this is sustained and maintained over a prolonged period of time, feelings of anxiety can become unbearable. Exhausted and perplexed, some people are tempted, and may in fact be prepared, to hand over their freedom and capacity to choose to experts and those who promise easy answers. This seems to be happening increasingly.
I believe this anxiety crisis is most seriously damaging in that segment of the population who by definition have the least resources to deal with this psychological condition. Of course, I am referring here to young people. It is well known from common sense and developmental psychology research that adolescence is, amongst other things, a period of considerable personal change. For most of us during this phase of our lives, we experience the normal anxieties associated with growth and change. Adolescence is a time during which we become more consciously aware that we have an important role to play in who and what we become. We all remember how this period is fraught with insecurities about our desire to be part of the group, but nevertheless still develop as a unique individual. These and many other issues faced by young people are the uncomfortable yet very often exciting stages we must pass through. It is partly because of this type of adolescent psychology that lockdowns, face masks, social distancing and warnings not to ‘kill granny’ have generated a collapse in the mental health of our young people. Given this situation, it is deeply immoral and unethical for Government, departments of education, health bodies and others to promote what can only be called superficial, quick fix, technique-focused approaches to a problem they have largely created. The first part of recovering mental health should be about returning to normal life, to our conditions and freedoms pre-Covid. Only then should we be looking at specific individual support where this is really needed. And then most of this help must not be of the quick fix variety, but be more in-depth and prolonged input.
In many ways I believe that the authorities are guilty of doing something which is prevalent in so many other parts of Western culture: addressing symptoms and ignoring underlying causes. Not only will this waste huge financial and human resources, but the vast majority of young people especially will not be helped by these actions. My own applied experience during 35 years of practice is that techniques to address symptoms very often fail, certainly beyond any initial benefit, and this leaves the client or patient in an even more hopeless and despairing place.
It also seems incredibly irresponsible for some bodies to be promoting the use of apps and technological devices to manage this anxiety crisis. There is extensive research from a wide range of academic disciplines which confirms that the overuse of mobile phones and the internet is contributing to alienation, social dislocation and a breakdown in community cohesion. Rather than reducing anxiety and increasing the acceptance of our innate freedoms, it very often appears that technology is being used inappropriately to make matters far worse.
I would like to take the opportunity here to plead with teachers, medical professionals, psychologists, the media and parents to speak out in any way they can, and to challenge the poison being offered, especially to our young people, as an antidote to a poison largely created by the policies of governments and their hand-picked experts.
Dr. Mark Stephen Nesti is a Consultant Psychologist and former Associate Professor of Psychology in Sport. His PhD in psychology was on the meaning of anxiety. He is author of Meaning and Spirituality in Sport and Exercise – Psychological Perspectives.
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“Israel’s Supporters Are LYING And The Gaza Death Toll Has NOT Been Revised Down”.https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2024/05/14/israels-supporters-are-lying-and-the-gaza-death-toll-has-not-been-revised-down/
There’s a difference between making claims about “The Gaza Death Toll” and “the Gaza civilian death toll”. One has the word ‘civilian‘ in it, and the other doesn’t, in case you haven’t noticed.
In case you hadn’t noticed the IDF have killed thousands of innocent women and children.
What figure of “civilian” casualties do you find acceptable?
Why are you assuming that I find the killing of civilians acceptable? Quote anything I said which makes you think that.
It’s war – in war there are no innocents.
No war in history has been fought without ‘innocents’ being killed.
No Palestinian in Gaza is innocent in any case, they all have blood on their hands.
The UN has so far not been able to produce independent, comprehensive, and verified casualty figures; the current numbers have been provided by the Ministry of Health or the Government Media Office in Gaza.
The additional 10,000 deaths reported by Hamas are now vaguely classified as “missing” or “under rubble” — a claim that U.N. OCHA now specifically attributes to the “Government Media Office” in Gaza, not its health authorities.
So it is “only” 5k women 8k kids. Well that is alright then.
PS It was irony. Just in case the down-tickers missed it.
You got more down-tickers after you pointed out it was irony!
Logic has long since departed from debates on Gaza, sadly,
What this really says is that there are no reliable numbers, and believing the UN, Hamas, or Al Jazeera numbers is pretty fantasy-land stuff.
As sad as the loss of life is, Israel has to press on to defeat Hamas totally, otherwise we will be doing this every few years forever.
Well, I am 70 and this has been going on all my life. So it is not just a simple problem.
Many readers here continually complain at the number of immigrants turning up on British shores – understandably, in my opinion. Well, that is precisely what happened in the Palestine area from the beginning of the 20th century onwards, after the Zionists had chosen the area to become the future Israel.
The problem was simply, as in UK, there were already inhabitants of the Palestine area, who owned and worked the land. But the Zionists pushed on, determined to declare a Jewish state which, with their wealth, their US and UK support (not sure why) and their weaponry, they have achieved.
Sadly, they had no desire to achieve a mixed country, composed of both Arabs and Jews, and that is a pity. There was an opportunity to have a sort of an economically stable and successful Singapore-type country in the Middle East but that obviously did not fit the agenda. They just bought up the land and used the Arabs, if at all, as simple workers.
This resulted in never-ending conflicts, and the British Administration just washed their hands of it all and handed over responsibility to UN in 1947 – and handing over responsibility to any committee is a good way of not solving any problems. But UN decided there should be a two-state solution, with Arabs and Jews somehow living peacefully side by side.
Israel has never paid much attention to UN resolutions and the result, implemented by force, has been to literally lock Arabs away in Gaza and the West Bank. Israelis continued, and continue, to harass the Arabian population (arresting or even killing them), and surprise, surprise, the latter are not happy.
Gaza is a land area with 24/7 surveillance, a surrounding fence and watch towers equipped with machine-guns operated remotely by Israeli forces.
Now, if you drop 2,000lb bombs on the area, it will be difficult to count the number of dead. And whether 16,000 or ‘only’ 8,000 children died, it is still pretty disgusting and inhuman to do such a thing – not to mention it being a war crime.
That is my understanding of the facts. If anyone has another opinion of the true situation, please go ahead and correct me.
“Many readers here continually complain at the number of immigrants turning up on British shores – understandably, in my opinion. Well, that is precisely what happened in the Palestine area from the beginning of the 20th century onwards.”
This is precisely what happened in the North of Ireland area from the beginning of the 17th century onwards.
But there comes a point when you have to accept that however they or their ancestors got there, they are now settled there, they are human beings, and they have a right to exist in the land where they were born and brought up.
I think you’re basically correct but you’re just telling one side of the story. The founding of Israel began with an all-out attack from its Arabian neighbours in order to nip it in the bud. They lost this war and hence, the UN partition plan was never really put into practice as planned.
This is really a textbook example for the fact that the good guys/ bad guys comic book story just doesn’t fit events in the real world.
Not really. The return of the Jews started in the 1880s and the land was mostly vacant, purchased by the Jews from absentee landords – mostly Turkish.
As soon as the Jews starting improving the economy the Arab Muslims arrived.
That is the reality. It was a desert and an economy backwater before the Jews arrived and civilised and cultivated the area.
A ‘little fact’ missing from the Muslim lovers account of the ‘tragedy’ in Gaza.
Let’s add up the dead Israelies since 1948. Dead from the never-ending Muslim Jihad.
The MUSLIM JIHAD. Another inconvenient fact for the Muzzie lovers. Coming soon to a town in England near you.
In the 1880’s, the Zionists were still considering which location would be suitable for the Jewish population: Argentina, Cyprus, East Africa or the Congo.
Palestine a desert and an economy backwater? I do not think so. The area which previously belonged to the Ottoman Empire was divided up between the British, French, Russians and Italians, whereby “Although the European Powers sought to establish spheres of influence, they recognized that sovereignty would rest with the rulers and people of the Arab territories … Since places sacred to three world religions were located there, an international régime was initially envisaged for Palestine which, however, eventually was to come under British control.” (https://www.un.org/unispal/history2/origins-and-evolution-of-the-palestine-problem/part-i-1917-1947/)
According to Riad Malki’s testimony before the ICJ (as Minister for Foreign Affairs and Expatriates of the State of Palestine), “Palestine was not a land without a people; it was not, as Israeli leaders have described it, a wasteland. There was life on this land. There was a political life, a cultural life, a social life, a religious life. It had schools and universities, cinemas and cultural halls; it had villages and villagers, families and communities, whose life was disrupted by the impact of a promise made thousands of miles away, over a hundred years ago. A breach of a sacred trust that relegated the indigenous people of the land to the status of “non-Jewish communities” – according them only civil and religious rights, denying their existence as a people and their rights as a nation and paving the way for their dehumanization and mass expulsion from their homeland decades later.”
Larry Johnson on Judging Freedom (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhtTsBYgfgk) counted the number of dead Israelis, not from 1948 but from the year 2000. “The Israeli Foreign Ministry on its website has a list of all Israelis that have been killed by what they call Palestinian violence from 2000 to 26th April 2024 … 1,455 were killed … from a total of 671 attacks, and of those attacks only 105 were claimed by Hamas. The rest it looks like … West Bank settlers killing Palestinians and Palestinians killing West Bank settlers. And yet, during the same time frame, the Israelis killed almost 8,000 Palestinians. Now that was over the previous 24 years, and then we get to October 7th where Hamas launches this major military attack – it was a military operation not a terrorist attack – and in retaliation for that Israel starts fighting back, over 1100 people died, we’re just not sure what percentage of those were killed by Hamas and what percentage were killed by the Israelis because the Israelis were randomly shooting up vehicles. But since October 7th, the number of Palestinian civilians killed is 40,000 plus and growing. Now, in the 70 years’ history of this, the Israelis have never killed this many …”
“Sadly, they had no desire to achieve a mixed country, composed of both Arabs and Jews, and that is a pity. There was an opportunity to have a sort of an economically stable and successful Singapore-type country in the Middle East but that obviously did not fit the agenda.”
I believe that more than 20% of Israeli citizens are Arab, and more than 90% of those are Muslim; so it is indeed a ‘mixed country.’
As to the Singapore-type allusion: Israel has achieved a degree of sophistication and high technical expertise that was (and probably still is) quite beyond the Arabs of the various countries in the Middle East. The fact that some are stupendously rich is simply based upon two factors: they were fortunate to be sitting on massive oil deposits, and they had Western (aka European) experts come in with the knowledge to monetise those assets. Left to their devices, they’d probably still be riding camels.
Israel should be seen for what it is: a relative jewel in a barren benighted region. If only the Arabs would see their advantages in working with (and benefiting from) the Israeli genius, all this nonsense could be avoided. But they’re unable to see it. And atrocities like Hamas (and their Palestinian enablers) are the tragic result.
More on the history of the perma-refugees, the scapegoating of Israel to manufacture a decades-long narrative and who the real culprits are. Interesting short video recording the testimonies of those forced to flee all those years ago;
”During Israel’s War of Independence from 1948 to 1949, as many as 750,000 Arabs left their homes in Israel. The PA has made accusing Israel of expelling the Arabs a formative part of its narrative. It still refers to this migration as the “Nakba,” meaning “catastrophe,” which it commemorates every year on May 15.
However, interviews with refugees as well as newspaper articles in the official PA press by refugees and about refugees, show that the Arabs blame their own leaders, their own armies, and their own Arab media—which lied to them and created unnecessary fear—for their flight from Israel.
A cornerstone of the PA’s ideology and propaganda is to blame Israel for the refugees and to demand that 100% of the descendants of the Arabs who fled, which have now reached 5.9 million according to UNRWA, be settled in Israel. The PA, however, has never acknowledged the collective Arab responsibility for the refugee problem. Even though PMW has gathered these Arab testimonies from official PA media, the PA itself continues to falsely blame Israel, and only Israel. As time goes on and more refugees speak candidly, the picture emerging is that the refugees themselves have always known the truth and that they really place the blame on their own leaders.
If the PA would finally acknowledge this historical fact and work to settle the 5.9 million descendants of the original refugees as equal citizens in the Arab states where nearly all of them were born, one of the great impediments to peace would be removed.
It should be noted that about 150,000 Arabs remained in the State of Israel and received equal rights and citizenship. Their numbers today have grown to 2,088,000. Israeli Arabs are found throughout society and serve in the Knesset, as judges, and teach in universities. While they are not drafted, many have volunteered to serve in the army, and some are officers.”
https://palwatch.org/page/35117
If the Arabs were not happy with their politicians – and I am not happy with mine – you can hardly blame them for leaving a place which was (and currently is) a war zone. But to demand that these displaced citizens should not be allowed to return to their own country and instead placed somewhere ‘similar’ (?), instead of somehow resolving the reason for their flight, is a bit strange.
Israel did not exist before 1948. To blame the plight of millions of Palestinians on their politicians may be partially correct but it does not excuse the continuing ‘genocidal’ behaviour of the Israelis.
Again, should the British had bombed Belfast flat in an attempt to wipe out the IRA? Would that have ever been justified? I do not think so. How about somebody doing a bit of diplomacy somewhere – it worked in Northern Ireland.
‘It worked in Northern Ireland.’ Err no! Not to my way of thinking. Only one thing ‘worked’ in NI following the GFA in ’98 and that was capitulation by Blair. No IRA weapons were ever handed over. IRA criminals were pardoned, whilst British soldiers were not and are still being persecuted. McGuiness, a proven murderer was allowed to strut his stuff brazenly on the World stage and even shook hands with the Queen. If his ambition to be eaten last by the crocodile, Blair was an exemplar of appeasement.
Well, the ‘Troubles’ stopped, so I think it did work. Peace negotiations always come with a price, sometimes very heavy, but it is important to stop the cycle of ever-repeating violence. The later persecution of British soldiers is, however, unpardonable and a dangerous step backwards.
Absolutely! Diplomacy seems to be unthinkable, a dirty word, now.
To add a bit to what you have written, while 750,000 Arabs left, a lot of whom left following advice from Arab countries to leave space for their invading armies, 900,000 Jews were expelled from Middle east and N.African counties , where they had lived sometimes for over 2000 years, of which 650,000 settled in Israel so a more or less equal swap. Just a couple of year before 14 million Germans were expelled from Silesia, E.Pomerania and E.Prussia to be replace by 9 million Poles moved west by the Russians who took over where they had formerly lived in what is now western Ukraine and Belorussia. Nobody is thinking of undoing that.
Not much reporting of that history, but for many years I worked with a Polish guy who was an immigrant (to England) from that area that became part of Belarus; he absolutely hated Russia.
Well said! Not too many are informed on the actual historical dynamics.
Also of note, Erdogan himself admitted recently that 1000+ Hamas militants are being treated in Turkish hospitals. So how did they get there? Funny sort of ‘open air prison’, don’t you think? I guess that description only applies to the human shields, the minions. When you have a ‘V.I.P’ status you get to use your ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card whenever it suits, seemingly. I’d be amazed if they ever find Sinwar now. Certainly he was never going to be discovered hiding in some manky old tunnel underneath Gaza was he? He’ll be long gone;
”Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Monday that more than 1,000 members of the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas are receiving medical treatment in Turkey.
“In my country, more than 1,000 members of Hamas are currently being treated in our hospitals,” Erdoğan said in Ankara at a joint press conference with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
Erdoğan once again described Hamas, which is listed as a terrorist organization in Europe, the United States and Israel, as a resistance organization. It is fighting to “protect its own territory and its people,” Erdoğan said.
He did not provide further details on where the Hamas members were wounded or how they arrived in Turkey.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/erdo-says-turkey-treating-more-214427542.html
Because male lives do not matter. Can you see it yet?
As an aside, is murdering less people ok then?
Nice emotive word, ‘murdering’. Incorrect but there you go, does it really matter? As long as you can get yourself worked into a tizzy along with all the other emotion-driven fools it is fair.
From the start the genocide narrative was suss. I think Israel have overreacted but chucking around this genocide nonsense helps no one. This is fundamentally a war over a small portion of land between Jews and Palestinian Arabs.
It’s my view, too. I don’t know what this says about me, but I find it hard to get worked up about a fight that’s been going on for, quite literally, thousands of years…
It couldn’t all just be a massive distraction, very welcome to our own tyrants, could it?
My dictionary defines genocide as “Extermination of a race”, which seems a fitting description of what is happening in Gaza. If you prefer, “mass murder” would also be a fitting term but it sadly does not make anything better.
USA stands on its own in the world in defending Israel. I cannot remember how many countries in UN voted in which resolutions against the recent Israeli actions but it was always the vast majority, with even UK abstaining.
And fundamentally your appraisal is correct but it is sad to hear of thousands upon thousands of deaths, financed by USA and supported by UK, wilfully caused by supposedly civilized people.
the 250,000 Arabs who settled in Gaza in 1948 has now grown to over 2 million. If the Israelis had wanted to kill lots of the civilian inhabitants they could easily have done that the next day.The civilian casualties are mainly the fault of Hamas and its deliberate policy of using civilians as human shields while it hides away in network of tunnels of greater mileage than the London underground.
The people who are dropping the bombs are responsible for the casualties and not the people who fail to avoid being killed by them.
Or those who started it all on October 7th
Not if they’ve gone to the trouble of giving them advanced warning, it’s not. That’s as nonsensical as me wheeling a baby in a pram onto the motorway and blaming the first motorist who inevitably flattens the pram. Is it not the fault of the driver who failed to react and dodge the pram in time? Or is it my fault for putting the baby foolishly and sadistically in harms way in the first place?
People have to take accountability. It’s an irrefutable fact that civilians are being used as cannon fodder, essentially, with the terrorists always fighting in civilian clothes for a reason, hiding in hospitals and schools, for a reason, and preventing the citizens from fleeing, for a reason. Not to mention not allowing said civilians entry to keep safe in the tunnels, for a reason. What other military do you know that drops millions of leaflets and makes countless phone calls in order to warn of the imminent danger that’s coming? If people are choosing or are being prevented from saving themselves how is that Israel’s fault? A sad reality is that all wars have collateral damage, which Israel is trying its best to keep on the lower end.
You don’t get to initiate a conflict, refuse to give up the many hostages you took, predictably come off worst then paint yourself as the victim.
The jihadis need to take ownership of what they’ve done to their people because 100% of the responsibility for the decimation of their homeland and lives lost as a result is on them.
You seem to suggest that civilians prevented from fleeing and denied safe haven in tunnels are responsible for allowing themselves to be bombed?
If tunnels are a safe haven, why would there be bombing when those in the tunnels (the enemy) will be unaffected?
The IRA used to give advanced warnings of bombings but I don’t recollect that making the outcome any more acceptable.
Motorwars are roads specially built for cars. The logic of your example thus suggests that Gaza must be something specially built to be bombed by Israel. That’s probably Netanyahu’s theory but the people living there won’t agree with that.
Don’t count on other people’s short memory. An Afghanistan story I remember was about a tanker going off road after an accident. This caused lots of Afghans to show up to steal the fuel. This, in turn, led to a German colonel asking for an airstrike which duly happened. This drove the looters away while killing some of them, which became a gargantuan news event because it was claimed they had all been ‘civilians’. IMHO, that was a bit of dubious story because no Afghan warriors wore uniform, they shouldn’t have been trying to steal the petrol to begin with and – of course – the officer who ordered the attack was German and hence, in lingua anglosaxoni, ‘a Nazi’ (you can really stop claming to differentiate between the two).
The Netanyahu Revenge Force has now been on rampage in Gaza which has no organized military for eight months in a row (including May and October). This means they’re obviously seeking to accomplish what they’re actually doing, namely, terrorize and kill the people living there, presumably, because it has a highly Netanyahu-beneficial effect on Israelian domestic politics. The “existential war” story is even less credible for them as it’s for the Russians in Ukraine.
Naturally the data is inaccurate and open to propaganda but the focus should be on ending the conflict, not coming up with excuses to continue.
Is this not what Holocaust deniers would claim about certain promoted death tolls that have also been disputed?
“They have been doing so to brainwash the international media, political leaders, celebrities and the protesters on our streets, to believe the lie”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/ny-rabbi-not-even-1-million-jews-killed-in-holocaust/
Would the Telegraph suggest that those reporting WW2 death tolls have “forgotten how war works”?
Am I mistaken in thinking that Hamas have hundreds of Israeli civilian hostages that they kidnapped on the October 7th?
The whole thing is a horrid shit show.
Reportedly 125 still captive, a number of bodies were returned a couple of days ago.
There’s ongoing protests and criticism of Netanyahu and the government for not doing enough to free them. Don’t expect to read much about it here though.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-recovers-bodies-of-hostages-itzhak-gelerenter-amit-buskila-and-shani-louk-in-gaza/
Persecution of Jews by the Left (Hitler was a Socialist and Labour drove out all but two Jewish MP’s from their party) and the drum banging for war. America rejecting Israel. Seems to me we have been here before. “Wipe out the Jews and everything will be okay”.
The other thing that is now worldwide is the silencing of any dissent. There are small enclaves such as Daily Sceptic but what do we achieve and who listens? The louder voice is shouting that we are Far Right and must be closed down. “They are only Jews, so the slaughter of a thousand or so is justified”.
Nothing much really changes, the rhetoric alters slightly, the same people come and go from Government but the aim remains the same. The Jews will be first and then us this time around. It is, now, today, our own Governments in the West who are coming for us under the guise of a fictional “war” with Russia and China.
The only war is the one waged against you.
It matters little, if anything at all, that the figures have been revised. The deliberate message has been delivered and sunk in. The rest is arse covering. The majority of Sheeples believe the Jews eat children and spit out the bones. That is all that really matters.
Sounds like the CoVid death count.
Over-stated numbers don’t have to be correct, just have the required effect.
Future revisions don’t matter because the objective was achieved. That’s the function of lies to mislead.