Dark and the Desert and Destriers me ken,
Sir Richard F. Burton
And the Glaive and the Joust, and Paper and Pen.
This week’s episode of London Calling must surely count as one of the fieriest of all time. It’s a fascinating show, for all the reasons expressed by Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review, and despite James Delingpole’s surprising evolution from libertarian-conservative to doomy conspiracy theorist and young earth creationist, as a listener, it has always felt like being in the same room with two old friends.
This feeling of being in the same room has edged closer to reality for me after I stumbled into journalism because of the war in Ukraine – my name now keeps popping up as a #TeamToby lackey and minor villain. It began when I wrote an article criticising one of James’s Delingpod episodes and was booted off his Telegram channel (which I’d joined to try to persuade James to write a response to my article), and seems to have intensified following my article about Calvin Robinson – reflecting what Toby described as a “schism” between pro-Ukraine and anti-war elements in the anti-lockdown (and largely pro-Brexit, Right-wing) community. But what I find troubling is not so much that there are disagreements about the war in Ukraine (although I’m disappointed by that), but that the response from James and others has been aimed at cancellation rather than honest debate.
James used to believe in rational debate. He knows that a key tactic of the climate alarmists has been to refuse any kind of debate – in fact, that’s been one of his criticisms of them. And he might broadly agree with the statement that the shutting down of any debate around lockdowns and the Covid vaccines has normalised this practice in the mainstream media in respect of a rather wide range of views and opinions. Anyone challenging the Whitehall-approved line on social media risks being accused of posting ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ and may face a suspension or ban. The suppression of dissent is hardly new, but in its current incarnation it seems to draw from the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century and the political Left.
Free speech and debate is essential in a democratic society, or it won’t remain democratic for long; but a belief in rational enquiry and free speech is not a natural tendency – rather, it has to be taught, and fought for, by every generation. With this in mind, when free speech advocates like James Delingpole, Calvin Robinson and Laurence Fox don’t want to engage in debate, but rather seek to cancel other free speech advocates who are arguing in good faith about an important topic of the day, it feels like an important rational principle has been lost in the Sturm und Drang. And while I wouldn’t compare myself to Christopher Hitchens, the response to my articles on Ukraine feels not too dissimilar from his experiences at the hands of the political Left when he went after their sacred cows. And that’s not a good thing.
So I’m throwing down the gauntlet to James, Calvin and Laurence – both individually and collectively – and challenging them to a debate on the topic of Ukraine. I say to them: pick a medium and forum of your choosing and let’s thrash it out.
Of course, I can envisage a few possible objections to this. The first of these has already been raised by James, who’s essentially dismissed me as far too insignificant a person for him to care about or give a platform to. My response would be that, from what I’ve seen (some of which I discussed here), you do care – and anyway the debate doesn’t have to be on your platform.
The second objection might be along the lines of: “I don’t debate shills, and you’re not arguing in good faith.” To which I’d say that I’ve never been paid a penny for any of my Ukraine articles, and as someone with an interest in the Daily Sceptic (having been involved in its creation, although not being on the editorial staff) it’s probably not in my self-interest to be writing articles that a lot of our readers seem to object to. As for any claim about not arguing in good faith, that in itself would be a bad faith argument: an ad hom cheat to avoid good-faith debate.
Another objection might be: “You’re only saying what we hear all the time in the mainstream media. People come to our platforms to hear an alternative point of view.” But this is actually just an appeal to conformity, and I won’t conform.
One final objection might simply take the form of a sneer, or a pleading of lack of time or interest – to which I would offer as rejoinder the traditional pre-joust insult from Malory: “Fie on ye, false recreant knights!”
Stop Press: I’m pleased to report that Laurence Fox has agreed to a debate, although for Calvin Robinson and James Delingpole it was infra dig.
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“Once the dictators realize that their plans are failing, they will turn to purely destructive pursuits, both to save face and to exercise revenge on the social order that resisted their brilliance.”
What’s behind BoJo’s most recent lockdown endorsement and in store soon.
Ludwig van Mises from the latest piece by Jeffrey Tucker.
Alistair Cavendish would probably agree.
His piece is a must read.
I suspect it will be an alternating cycle now: vaccination drives to raise hopes of ending Lockdowns, leading to slight loosening and reopening, followed by thrashing the vaccines and discovering mutations to institute new Lockdowns.
The main and real driver and gauge will be hairdressers: How long will people keep quiet without having had the opportunity for a haircut.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/weasel-words-and-broken-promises-on-the-road-to-endless-lockdowns/
The most recent one on CW, very good too.
Excellent summary of this duplicitous governments behaviour over the past twelve months.
How they’re ‘nudging’ us into tyranny in CW is a vital read. Tavistock?
Like they ‘nudged’ us into buying diesel cars for twenty years even though they knew them to be carcinogenic (they discussed on Newsnight and such like at the time).
Then when their climate change priorities changed we were all accused of deliberately wanting to give cancer to children.
One interesting aspect is that they have pushed us to be hyper risk averse of covid – ‘if it saves one life’ and haven’t contextualised the data within normal deaths of other things – especially similar colds which take off 100,000 a year
And now they want us to contextualise vaccine deaths – ‘its only a few – for the greater good etc’
They can argue for zero covid deaths and I can argue for zero vaccine deaths. Given that covid deaths are an act of God and vaccine deaths are a man-made intervention you can be sued for – I think the latter argument is easier to make.
Your last paragraph might explain the unexpected notification that my GP Surgery will not be giving vaccines to 18-49s, the realisation that they might get sued in the event of misadventure.
I think its also why they want to coerce instead of force vaccinations on people.
They can always say ‘you knew it was only emergency licensed and you chose to take it’.
Although with vaccine passports etc the line between coercion and mandation becomes muddied. Add that to the lies about it being ‘safe and fully tested’ etc.
cf. ‘Nobody was forced to wear a mask, we provided plenty of options for self declared exemption so your mask induced respiratory disease is your own fault’.
yes – its almost like the whole pandemic has been designed by the lawyers to keep them in work for the next 50 years
This! Said it at the time, the guidance is so vague to cover Bozo’s arse.
I am pretty sure that there must be an important, not publicized, legal reason for the UK’s ‘soft’ mask mandate, or rather the unique self-exempt possibility and option and, obviously, for the strict acceptance of businesses of it due to the disability act.
They are an experimental medical intervention, not without side effects and, IMO, an assault on one’s bodily autonomy.
The same is true with regard to the gene therapies deliberately misleadingly called vaccines, which are even officially only approved temporarily and as experimental.
Mandating them would most certainly also assault and infringe upon one’s bodily autonomy, which is why it can’t and won’t be done by government even if/once fully approved.
The interim legal angle to prevent the outsourcing of the mandate and coercion from government to businesses is likely the experimental nature, certainly in the USA where that is already in front of the courts, brought on behalf of a teachers union.
It should though also be deemed illegal in general, as businesses simply have no right to infringe upon one’s bodily autonomy and as the possible restriction of access by businesses of the unvaxxed without a prior law being made falls foul of the disability act again, as with masks, and this principle should be deemed unacceptable anyway in a democracy- a country that accepts this, that businesses are above the law and can make their own ones in such matters, should abolish its then useless and superfluous legislature and judiciary as well.
I also think that any form of mandatory invasive testing, like oral or nasal swabs or blood tests, are an assault and infringement on one’s bodily autonomy and that they are also simply illegal- in particular again as the PCR and LFT tests are also only approved under emergency authorisation for another year as well, and as they are useless due to not being standardized, leading to arbitrary results and ‘punishments’ (the latter applies to non-invasive aka spit LFT tests as well).
As for the refusal or result then ensuing access denial by businesses, see above.
I am pretty sure that the government is fully aware of all this and just tries it anyway.
It is a scandal and indicative of an either corrupted or completely incompetent legal profession in the UK that no one has brought these cases and arguments to the courts yet.
Perhaps that is why the ‘vaccines’ are being given free of charge.
If we had to pay for them one might sue under the Trades Description Act since they are clearly not ‘vaccines’ at all.
I can never for the life of me understand why anyone without symptoms who feels well would even consider having a test let alone queuing up to have one.
‘The free world died of COVID 19’
‘Covid Mania has turned the world’s sovereign states into one tyranny after another.’
https://www.aier.org/article/the-free-world-died-of-covid-19/
And, not least, this sovereign state…….turned into a totalitarian fascist dictatorship run independently of parliament by the panjandrums of the NHS socialist enterprise.
This country and its health service is in more in need of fundamental reform now than at any time, arguably, since the reign of Charles I
‘Aneurin Bevan, the minister responsible for its creation, suffered from no such timidity. He described the National Health Service as “a piece of real socialism,” and spoke of how it stood “opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society.”
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/07/aneurin-bevan-on-the-socialist-ambitions-of-the-nhs
What has happened over the last twelve months in Britain has been a long time in the making….and now requires a swift and radical unmaking…..
“socialist enterprise”
Once again a moron strikes : “It’s all socialism!”
This sort of nonsense gives Johnson a run for his money in the rubbish stakes.
This is far too serious a situation for knuckle-draggers indulging in the games of the political playpen.
Indeed…. red pill v blue pill…. left v right….dem v rep… lab v con etc…etc when you get globalists such as Sir Kier Starmer and dear old Tony B…. its a bickering nonsense…
The following is an agenda list I can believe in:
Lockdowns, PPE and social distancing have never been shown to benefit the
course of any epidemic, yet they can have devastating effects on society. Such
diktats should be rendered unlawful:
1. Reassert freedom of speech, opinion and choice.
2. Restore open scientific debate.
3. Promote personal responsibility and accountability and the protection of
basic human liberties
4. Promote mutual respect with regards to feelings of fear and personal health
choices.
5. End quarantining of asymptomatic individuals.
6. Eliminate forced isolation of symptomatic individuals. Recommend resting
at home when experiencing flu-like symptoms for up to eight days from the
onset of symptoms and until the absence of fever for 24 hours.
7. Develop a public health awareness campaign to promote hand hygiene and
a healthy lifestyle consisting of healthy eating, plentiful exercise and adequate
exposure to the sun (or vitamin D supplements).
Not to be found on any May 6th canvassing materials…anywhere.
https://www.pandata.org/about/protocol-for-reopening-society/
“ bickering nonsense…”
Indeed. I suppose it keeps the knuckle-draggers happy, but an analysis in traditional one-dimensional political terms is just stupid axe-grinding – and pointless. I’m on the traditional ‘left’ – but I have no idea what the term ‘socialism’ actually means in accurate descriptive terms. But I do know that you have to be intellectually one slate short of a roof to think that this shit-show can be analysed in such a framework.
I’m sort of anarcho-conservative and don’t see lockdown etc as Socialist at all, more Corporatist in the style of Mussolini.
‘The State is everything and everything is The State’ (something like that from memory).
This is not complicated.
Most on here understand that the government is being directed by the National Health Service via SAGE.
The National Health Service is a socialist construct:
‘Placing its creation in the context of a broader social transformation aimed at empowering workers – and diminishing what Marx referred to as “the wages system” – Bevan describes the NHS as “the most revolutionary feature of the British Socialist programme.”
Reference above
The measures instigated by this NHS coup are buttressed by governmental diktat unsupervised by parliament and backed with draconian sanctions enforced by state security services.
Socialist fascism.
In offering the AZ vaccine to the under 60s, the UK has become a definite ‘outlier’.
Maybe we are right and everyone else is wrong – who knows? Maybe they are all risk averse or maybe we are a rogue state. Time will tell
“He’s probably concerned, as I am, about the scenes in London that we saw, for instance, of people enjoying the outside of the pubs and the crowded spaces,” Prof Harnden tells BBC Breakfast.
He probably felt like that long before the pandemic
They want to start getting a bit of CONSISTENCY into their message and pronouncements. That guy clearly hadn’t seen the advertisement being shown every night on TV showing the 2 middle class couples in their garden socialising SAFELY because they were OUTSIDE where the covid gets dispersed into the air – just like all the people outside the pubs in soho were – why is it ok for someone’s back garden and not for outside a pub in soho. Strewth. sorry, I am just so incredibly angry with all the handwringing health and safetyism.
The johnson mantra about the ‘vaccine cavalry being around the corner’ (filched from hancock) either turned into Custers last stand or somebody reminded HMP that shortly after their arrival 50-90% of First Americans died of European virus and other diseases.
Or by chopping and changing perhaps he is deliberately stoking feelings of chaos. Extract from a John le Carre interview shortly before his death.
‘And for the political class a disdain grows with the the years
“Politicians love chaos, don’t ever think otherwise. It gives them authority and it gives them power. It gives them profile.
The idea that they’ll fix it for you”.
He (le Carre) despairs about what he believes is absolutism on the political right and left, libertarian and Leninist with the same objective. To start again after the chaos”.
Or after the Great Reset ?
“Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s suggestion that lockdown has played a significant part in reducing coronavirus infection levels is backed up by the data, says Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, a statistician from the University of Cambridge.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It is the lockdown that has caused the major drop, of course, because we’ve seen that happen in the huge reduction in the people who haven’t been vaccinated.”
Spiegelhalter is just relying on the modelling of Ferguson which doesn’t explain the drops in countries that didn’t lock down. I expect he wants a knighthood and this is his price
Either that or he’s applied for a substantial grant from ‘The Foundation’.
The ever-changing position on how to tackle this very normal seasonal virus is to deliberately confuse the already mentally-tenderised population.
If the previously celebrated ‘vaccine’ programme was a success, that would mean the virus has been dealt with… [malfunction!] No, the vaccine is now only a tool in the cabinet to deal with this virus, we need to lockdown again. Of course this is completely at odds with Madcock crying on TV repeatedly about how the ‘vaccine’ is our way to freedom. The confusion puts the population into a state of constant panic, like a rabbit in the headlights waiting to be snuffed out by it’s impending doom.
This will never end until our society is totally unrecognisable and they’ve fully implemented the Great Reset.
The UK Lockdown was so successful it worked in Florida and Sweden too!
Does anyone know of a comparable website to this one which doesn’t promote the vaccine? I’ve had enough of the daily support it is showing towards a dangerous drug that is being used on healthy people.
This PANDA summary J4mes is one of the very best responses to the hysterical unscientific blatherings via the state approved Covidian Cultists within the UK – gargoyles like Eggwina Curry (standing for office again) – spew out:
https://www.pandata.org/a-critical-analysis-of-the-covid-response/
Many thanks, I’ll give it a look.
Bye. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Every time I’m just about to give up hope, you call me back, Lucan. Your predictable insults and general ad hominem is far too entertaining to leave!
““Why is Boris talking down Britain’s vaccine success again?“
Why reference this load of old tosh in Round Up? We can read similar in the Guardian any day.
Somebody seems to be busting a gut here on promoting ‘vaccines’ as the miracle they aren’t.
If they are editorialising as such then fair enough but I don’t think this is so, a round up of the news is fine by me. The figures do not support the vax or the lockdown and I suspect Toby and Will both know this. I’m hugely grateful for this site and it’s efforts over the last year. If there is a new conflict or pressure from a regulator, or they have simply decided the vax is our saviour (when clearly it is not), then they should declare as such and I’ll review my opinions accordingly.
The only place you’ll read anything different is on sites full of nutters. Fortunately this isn’t one of them.
Perhaps time to join James and go elsewhere? Then we can get the comment section back to rational discussions of risk based upon data.
Your own popularity suggests you’ve got a long way to go to get everyone agreeing with your pro-‘vaccine’ madness Lucan.
By next year this time, it could well hsve gone down in history as having been a Titanic success.