“The Establishment” was a phrase coined by Henry Fairlie in the Spectator in 1955. “By the Establishment,” he wrote, “I do not mean only the centres of official power – though they are certainly part of it – but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised.” Well. The Establishment of 1955 to 2015 has been rattled in our time by the first great challenge to its authority. This Establishment – represented by its voices in the media – has for some time been irritated into attempting some sort of analysis of what is going on: what the recalcitrant are up to. There are three major suggestions. In short:
- We have lurched to the Right. Reality remains what it was, and we are simply changing position in it.
- We have diagonalised: which means that we are trying to break up the old distinction of Left and Right in order to form a new consensus. We are reforming reality.
- We have gone down the rabbit hole, gone off the deep end, crossed over into the mirror world. We have left reality altogether.
The first and third are lazy. The second is trying to be clever. All have some truth in them. But they are all incorrect. All avoid asking why we are doing this.
But of course the Establishment is not interested in asking why.
1
You must have noticed that everyone nowadays is “lurching” to the Right. I cannot be bothered citing examples. Simply search the internet for “lurch to the Right” and you’ll see that you can find it being used by Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, Newsweek, Politico, the American Conservative, the New European, the BBC and others. Seldom does anyone lurch to the Left. No, they shift to the Left, in fact, probably glide. Though we should note that the Right only tends to “lurch” in headlines: in the text one finds gentler words like “swing” or “move”. (Who controls the editors?) Nonetheless, in the headlines everyone lurches. “A huge lurch to the Right and more austerity”, groaned Owen Jones a few years ago. I wonder who invented this form of speech: everyone took it up and it is now a glorious cliché.
The suggestion, delightfully, is that anyone who is even slightly critical of the Establishment is not quite in control of their movements. For the word “lurch” means a sudden, unexpected movement, apparently uncaused: associated with the human stagger when tired and emotional. It is not deliberate, it is accidental: caused only by one’s having drunk too much alcohol or one’s having been rebuilt as a Frankenstein’s monster, thereby disqualified from comprehensible behaviour. There is something alarming about a lurch. So anyone who talks about a lurch to the Right is using language to imply a complete lack of justification for the movement.
Incidentally, I noticed a few days ago that the Guardian in the last few days described Elon Musk’s support for Donald Trump at a rally as evidence of his having “swerved” to the Right.
Trump then veered into more familiar territory of falsehoods about immigration and other topics. Later he called up on stage Musk, the Chief Executive of Tesla and owner of social media platform X, who has swerved politically Right. Wearing a black cap and black “Occupy Mars” shirt and coat, Musk jumped around with his arms held high and was greeted with cheers… Musk argued: “President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution. He must win to preserve democracy in America. This is a must-win situation. Get everyone you know, drag them to register to vote. If they don’t, this will be the last election. That is my prediction.”
I thought that the use of the word “swerve” was unusual. Perhaps the writer, one David Smith, was, like Blur, thinking of cars? Whatever the cause, the metaphor is revealing. For one lurches as a consequence of something unexpected: it is unintended, uncaused: one is stupid. But one swerves to avoid something. One swerves consciously. Something is happening and there is a tiny concessionary hint that one is responding to it with one’s intelligence.
Still, the language is unflattering. As analysis, it is very lazy. It certainly fails to mention why Musk “swerved” and what he was “swerving” away from.
2
“Diagonalise” is the sort of word you’ll forget three minutes after reading this article. Hang on, what did diagonalise mean again? Can’t be bothered checking, forget about it. But, while you are here, let me tell you that it is a clever coinage by two writers for the Boston Review, William Callison and Quinn Slobodian, who in 2021 published an article on “Coronapolitics“. They wrote:
Diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of Left and Right (while generally arcing toward far-Right beliefs), to express ambivalence if not cynicism toward parliamentary politics, and to blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties.
The suggestion seems to be that people are not lurching or swerving to the Right, but doing something else entirely: namely, tearing up the very distinction between Left and Right. Our authors derive the term “diagonalising” from a German term, Querdenken, which was used to describe the German, Swiss and Austrian Coronaskeptiker movement.
Callison and Slobodian observe rightly that not all sceptics are on the Right. So no talk of lurching or swerving here. They say that diagonalists are a Widdecombe Fair (Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all) of odds and sods and rags and tags who, whatever their old politics were, are now agreed that all power is a conspiracy and hence that the Establishment in all its manifestations (they list “the state, Big Tech, Big Pharma, big banks, climate science, mainstream media and political correctness”) is tending or trending totalitarian.
Callison and Slobodian are unfriendly analysts. We find them occasionally lapsing into standard Establishment scorn: “It would be easy to dismiss… freelance media hustlers, movement messiahs and entrepreneurial contrarians… neo-Nazi attendees… lack of charisma… river of falsehoods… Alex Jones.” They say, for instance: “When removed from platforms like YouTube for spreading unfounded conspiracies, they decry their loss of ‘free speech’ and ‘constitutional rights’ and often blame the Government for their newfound unfreedom.” This in fact is one of the most irritating moves in the entire anti-sceptical, anti-diagonalising Establishment strategy. What everyone does, from the BBC to CNN to the Guardian is, when they are not 1) quoting Establishment “experts”, is 2) quoting the lurchers and swervers and diagonalisers in exactly the opposite manner. When they quote an expert, that is the story. But when they quote an anti-expert, a critic, a sceptic, then the story is about the self-evidently rhetorical trickiness and falsity of whatever it is they – we – are saying: a lot of inverted commas, scare quotes are needed, the more the better.
They put ‘free speech’ in brackets, so that it is not a thing, not a value, not something important, but a talking point: a bit of noise made by the excluded Skeptiker. They mock the idea that there is a sense in which all power is a conspiracy, whereas, read Machiavelli or Naudé, or anyone, the Bible, for God’s sake, it is. They engage in sneer and smear and slight: “Typical of diagonal entrepreneurs worldwide, the Querdenken cohort battles the ‘Corona Dictatorship’ on behalf of the ‘Truth Movement’ while making a buck on the side.” They do not mention the fact that they are making a buck on the side too: oh, and that Fauci made a buck on the side, that Mann made a buck on the side, that Kerry made a buck on the side.
This is my favourite bit:
Angela Merkel spoke to the topic of Querdenken in mid-December [2020] with rare emotion. Calling the movement “an attack on our entire way of life”, she said that “since the Enlightenment, Europe has chosen the path of building our view of the world on the basis of facts”. Confronting an “anti-factual” movement was very difficult, she said, “perhaps it will be a task for the psychologists”.
Again, what Callison and Slobodian miss is that there are two sides to this question, and that while there is, no doubt, Merkel’s Enlightenment, there is also another Enlightenment, which alleges that the facts that Merkel and her cronies were standing on were not facts at all but something else entirely: and that there was an enlightened way of trying to oppose them. In short, that Merkel’s “faktenbasierten Sprache” was balderdash on rollerblades.
Anyhow, Callison and Slobodian are onto something. They say we tend to “paint a dystopian picture of the conspiracy of power”. They also say this, which is (almost) fair:
Diagonalism could be seen as a fight over science. But both sides put open-ended investigation at the centre of their identity. Public health officials acknowledge that science is done in public, knowledge of the virus is evolving and forecasts are only ever provisional. Diagonalists respond that the truth is hidden by elite obfuscation and constant search is necessary in alternative fora.
Aye, aye. Still, they cannot explain why neo-Nazis, libertarians and members of the Green party, plus Thomas Fazi and other aggrieved Leftists bother diagonalising when they could simply swerve instead.
3
If one is tired of reading headlines about “lurching”, and gets a headache from words like “diagonalising”, then the quickest fix is to say that we have gone “down the rabbit hole”. This is simplistic, but not as simple as “lurch”. “Lurch” assumes one world. So, does that matter, does “diagonalise”, even if it hexes and vexes that world. But “rabbit hole” assumes the existence of two worlds: one world of appearances, and another of reality. One, the world we have always known, the world we live in, the world of convention and, indeed, the Establishment: the Matrix. And another world, the world of esoteric knowledge, hidden conspiracies, fascinating possibilities, and the dark suggestion that cancer is the grandest taboo subject of our time.
“Down the rabbit hole” is the favoured phrase of James Delingpole. But it is also used by people, like Alice’s sister, who very strongly doubt that it is possible to go down a rabbit hole, unless one means to go as mad as a hatter, ha, ha, how do you know what a mad hatter is, eh?, unless you have done down the rabbit hole? Naomi Klein used the phrase in her book Doppelganger, in which she tried to work out what was wrong with Naomi Wolf. Klein is a one-worldist (“there’s nothing to see here that you can’t already see on CNN”). To her horror, Wolf is a two-worldist (“there’s something you have not been told…”).
The problem with the language of “going down the rabbit hole”, though useful, in fact, a lot more useful than “diagonalising”, or, of course, “lurching”, is that it does not explain why anyone would go down the rabbit hole. Because it’s there, is one answer. But that is not an answer for those who don’t want to go there.
4
So I’ll just suggest instead that all these bits of analysis are flawed by the fact that Establishment types cannot believe they are wrong. So their analysis is actually incomprehension under a thin and cracking veneer of analysis.
The truth is, of course, that the Establishment is heavily invested in denying that argument is possible, and that its members have engaged in a great conspiracy to commandeer knowledge on the old Baconian and new Foucauldian ground that “knowledge is power”. They might prattle about “‘”Enlightenment”, but they have wholly forgotten the good old Scottish Enlightenment insight – found in David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and others – not only that what goes up must come down but that what goes up goes up at the same time that something else goes down. There is more in the world than in their philosophy, Horatio. The world is a complicated dialectical contradictory mess. They fail to see this, or are paid to ignore it. So they have fallen back on strange abuse and stranger analysis to try to shore up their trumpery sandcastle.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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Why are they more concerned with 18 year olds getting their first vaccine than 40 year olds getting their second? If the delay was so that more “vulnerable” people could be offered the vaccine (ie those aged 40+ who are not vulnerable at all but still more so than those aged 18) why have they been offering them to younger age groups and not delaying first jabs for younger people to focus on double jab protection?
It’s a numbers game; x = the number of experimental drugs administered. Increase x as much as possible before they wake up, more money in our pocket, job’s a good’un, tea and crumpets at the club (actually coke and catamites at the club…….).
It’s just a shame the Epstein Island club closed down.
I presume you have heard of illegal drugs suppliers and organisers (Big Pharma & WHO) organised local cartels (the state), street pushers (NHS), junkies (citizens), and the phrase “get it into them (ie school kids) early”?
Here we have a state sponsored drugs racket that will leave the UK as a jUnKie nation, at great long term cost (financially and health wise) to the taxpayers; job done.
Queue Curtis Mayfield…..
Because it’s all utterly pointless but maybe 18 year olds are even more easily brainwashed?!
They are, and most have been.
Yes in a way they are. They have no frame of reference. They don’t realise all of this is unusual. Pandemic you say? Oh my god. I am killing granny you say? Oh my dayz. The Guardian says I should? My university says I should? Ok. Vaccinate me.
Those older than 50 have a frame of reference.. they are bigger fools. When has a 40, 50, 60, 70 year old ever known a society shut down for a mild virus? Never. Yet they still fell for it in droves.
The sooner 18 year olds are vaccinated the sooner vaccine passports can be introduced. It will be a main caviat if and when SAGE permit Johnson to unlock.
because young people have babies. I mean kill granny.
So they can use that as the next extension excuse – ‘Those that got the 1st jab between June & July now need to get their 2nd’ – On and on and on we go until September when , ramped up fear with new scariant, emergency powers are renewed, booster experiments for those taking part in the trial, autumn / winter lockdown to protect the NHS from the man made 5 million waiting list – Rinse repeat, round & round & round we go until the people stand up and take back control from this tyrannical out of control dangerous government committing heinous crimes against humanity
In the jab-nudges sent by the Notional Health Service it doesn’t mention any side effects or it’s experimental status….
makes you wonder…
Everyone who I know has been jabbed has been having a cough recently, unjabbed me, i’m perfectly fine…
Maybe i should fake a cough…
http://2h3mh837ken53kitqv1co5fh83o.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Invasion_of_the_Body_Snatchers-1.jpg
Yep – otherwise the zombies will turn on you and eat your brains!
Some people I know who have had the jab have come down with mild cold-like symptoms recently lasting a week or so – ok it could be absolutely nothing, but on the other hand I’m unjabbed and have not come down with so much as a sniffle so far (touch wood).
Funny that the new delta variant symptoms are very much cold like. Described as being like hay fever right in the middle of hay fever season. You couldn’t make it up but somebody quite obviously is, getting paid a shit load to do it as well.
Maybe because you still have an immune system and they no longer do
The correct medical term is “coof”
I reckon only 5% of the population will pass this intelligence test.
I reckon if you asked a typical sheep who thinks they know all about the deadly batflu:
– Have you heard of Ivermectin?
– Did you know that Florida and Texas have been open and normal for many months?
– Did you hear about the two biggest London protests since the gulf war?
– Did you know that many of the most eminent and specifically qualified medical experts have been shouting about this being madness since March 2020?
The answer to all questions would be “no” for 90% plus. Naturally they would then go on to lecture you about the imminent third wave, all the kids dying in hospital, and the millions phucked by long covid.
Many of these sheep will appear intelligent on paper. Unfortunately, intelligence doesn’t matter, what matters is curiosity to research things yourself, and because they are used to lazily typing any question into Google, they can’t be arsed to do the slightest amount of digging.
There seems to be confusion amongst society about intelligence. Most people associate it with being able to recite things that they’ve heard in various places, however I would conjecture it involves the ability to question information and speculate based on things you already know. The masses do not do this.
As a recent escapee of the education system, all to often I would see that it is geared to rewarding those who can best recite what is given to them, formulating new ideas was a foreign concept. Even explanations of things were given to you, and you had to remember these to do well. No thinking for yourself.
It may explain partly why people are so dismissive of things that they haven’t heard before.
I had a conversation recently I was told I was irresponsible for not being jabbed (a word I hate). I bombarded them with facts and stats they were completely astonished.
It’s really not very difficult all you need is a little curiosity and the ability to turn the TV off. Although I do enjoy listening to Witty and co jumping through hoops.
No thanks. I’m happy with my body’s immune response battalions.
A nation of routine pill poppers and serial hypochondriacs meets Big Pharma’s State backed Ponzi scheme – what’s not to like for financial speculators?
Ooh, “new categories of “treatments.” Splendid. Such as Ivermectin, zinc, HCQ, or maybe a couple of paracetamol and a lie down? Or maybe, not telling genuinely sick people to wait until their lips go blue before they clog up the hospital? After all, we all have to protect RNHS.
This article shows just how desperate folk are to get their hands on treatment for Long Covid. Until the “medical emergency” is over, no chance whatsoever of getting my hands on any of the above treatments.
Us Long Covid sufferers have been thrown to the wolves & I expect more to join the ranks as no treatment is allowed to prevent this happening.
Absolutely bloody criminal!
Long COVID Patients Are Taking Their Health Into Their Own Hands (vice.com)
Get a horse and you can get ivermectin.
In the form of a horse wormer? Not sure that’s a great idea although I and a friend have already thought about it!
Hi. I managed to get ivermectin (as well as Fluvoxamine and HCQ) from India using Indiamart. I was pretty wary at first so bought a sample before getting a larger quantity. It takes about 10 days.
Full sterilization/depop plan underway.
No bad thing if it culls the idiots.
Neutralising monoclonal antibodies.
Anyone in Sage invested in the development of these, or closely linked to departments in universities getting large grants for research into them?
Anyone like to fess up and save Conservative Woman the time?
Inject it all yourself, where the sun don’t shine, Stevens.
“Sir Simon Stevens, Chief Executive of the NHS in England, said the health service hoped to “finish the job” of vaccinating people over the next month.”
Hold on, I thought the job involved vaccinating those most at risk from coronavirus. But that was done weeks and weeks ago.
So the job won’t be “finished” one month from now. Because the NHS will then start on the kids, and the adult refuseniks. And then they will start on the boosters. This will never end.
Screenshot this post.
These vaccines will be used an excuse to continue lockdown
Further to my comment on a prior post, the SPI-M modellers have basically thrown in the towel and admitted that they have no idea how to model the pandemic at all. There is no science to follow, in other words, apart from “knowing” that the vaccines work. As a result there is now “only one job” to do and that is to try and get as many people vaccinated as possible and coercion is being used via threats of vaccine passports, no travel, no opening of nightclubs, retaining social distancing etc. to try and get as many of the younger cohort vaccinated before restrictions are lifted. The only data that they want follow is the number of adults vaccinated.
Haha! You’ve got to get the treatment ‘within 3 days of infection’ so roll up everyone for your minimum twice weekly test for evermore, to make sure you haven’t got the deadly deadly and also asymptomatic virus before that 3 days is up. So let’s use up all those millions of useless lateral flow tests to find the terrifying infection.
You really couldn’t make up this shit. How does anyone fall for this. My 12 year old has better critical thinking skills than most adults. Jeez.
Get everybody vaccinated then start using Ivermectin and other treatments that they’ve chosen to suppress, bingo the vaccine works.
Don’t use Ivermectin and other treatments on the unvaccinated, bingo the vaccine works.
My attitudes over time:
1.(start of pandemic, even before the panic began) “yeah sure a vaccine for this is good idea”
2.(days after our rights are first stolen) “this virus clearly isn;t so bad as they think it, but a vaccine can’t be a bad idea”
3.(summer of 2020) “if a vaccine can stop them panicking us in to lockdowns then yes, roll on with it”
4.(winter of 2020) “we’ve got a vaccine now, why are they still panicking”
5.(spring of 2021) “I’ll take it, if they do not roll out vaccine passports domestically”
6.(summer of 2021)”why the hell would I take it if it won’t get everyone back to normal!”
To any state data spiders browsing this, I’m making myself clear, add this to your “reasons for hesitancy” file, I have nothing against this jab, I’m reasonably confident it is safe, but I am refusing it out of PURE SPITE until you man up and start treating covid like a medical condition (to be vaccinated against in the vulnerable and concerned populations where they consent) instead of as a an excuse to destroy every aspect of western civilisation under your jackboots.
They can still shove it up their arse
Being offered it is one thing, but why do they keep sending me letters?
Surely “RAM IT…..Sideways” is a clear response, but still they persist. The purple pamphlet gives off some nice fumes when burned however.
Facemasks required at weddings.. and no dancing allowed. why stop there? I think the married couple shouldn’t have sex either on their honeymoon. or any time before or after. missionary with masks perhaps after one one year – but only after two jabs and permission from king BoJo.
How to prepare for a pandemic:
Feel free to add more.
‘Greed’ and ‘capitalism’ helped UK’s vaccines success, says PM
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-56504546
What does he mean by that?
This Nonsterilising Innoculation is riddled with potential short and long term hazards.
Brett Weinstein and guests: Vaccine is dangerous clip: https://youtu.be/Du2wm5nhTXY
Full video 3hrs: https://youtu.be/-_NNTVJzqtY
Reposting the scholarly review article. https://ijvtpr.com/index.php/IJVTPR/article/view/23/49
Steve Kirsch article “Should you get vaccinated?”
https://trialsitenews.com/should-you-get-vaccinated/
What about HCQ and Ivermectin Mr Stevens? Too cheap for you?
neutralising monoclonal antibodies are more profitable, even if they don’t work
Finnish MP clarifies responsibility for the vaccination program:
https://rapsodia.fi/covid-vaccine-genocide-english-subtitles/?fbclid=IwAR1_gRuaQHZL7KLyFVQD8EWQKt43UirK4Laew1dQ4f6PpCmoSJUwvUslcyI
They can stick their jab and not in their arm.