Category Archives: Culture war

After Covid

We won’t get normality back without a fight

Over at Spiked-online, Brendan O’Neill observes and comments on the rather sudden change in tune in the official and mainstream commentariat regarding all things Covid. He writes:

“Suddenly, everyone’s talking about getting back to normal. After 22 months of restrictions, of going in and out of lockdown, of a suspension of civil liberties that was unprecedented in modern peacetime Britain, all the talk is of ‘moving on’. Let’s learn to live with Covid, politicians say.”

He rightly says that “moving on” won’t be easy.

“As sociologist and SAGE adviser Robert Dingwall said back in May 2020, officialdom ‘effectively terrorised’ the public into believing Covid would kill them if they broke the rules. We created a ‘climate of fear’, he said. The consequence of terrorising the public, rather than galvanising us to pull together to combat the spread of Covid and assist the vulnerable, became clear very early on. Snitching abounded. Neighbours told on neighbours. Venturing outside came to be viewed as dangerous anti-social behaviour. Police forces went wild, clearing people out of parks for no good reason and even sending drones to spy on dog-walkers in scenic country spots. The culture of atomisation that predated Covid was intensified by the terror officialdom deployed in response to Covid. Repairing solidarity will be a tough task.”

“And what about the culture of freedom? Forget, for a moment, the way our legally guaranteed liberties were put on ice during this crisis. That was bad, no question. But a more injurious if sometimes intangible process was taking place alongside this temporary unwinding of our rights. The culture of freedom was undermined. The individual self-confidence and social trust that freedom depends upon, which freedom cannot exist without, was pummelled, day in, day out. We were educated to distrust others, to distrust ourselves.”

His conclusion:

“We hear a lot about ‘Covid denialism’, about those who deny the scientific reality of Covid-19’s impact on human health. Those people are certainly worth challenging. But I would venture that there is a worse problem – cultural denialism; the blinkered belief that lockdown was a simple and straightforward measure to deal with a health crisis rather than something that was also highly influenced by the cultures of fear, distrust and censorship that sadly define this young century. To my mind, this cultural denialism is worse than scientific denialism because it keeps at bay the political reckoning we will need to have if we are ever to restore the human connections and individual self-belief that are necessary to a good society. For nearly two years we’ve been told that protecting health is the highest aim of human society. We now need to make a very different case – that it is freedom that makes life worth living, and that everything should be bent towards making freedom a reality for all people. Let’s fight for that normality.”

The Only Safe Sex

"The combination of Eros and Agape that is the recipe for true love"

On the LewRockwell.com site, Ira Katz posted an essay yesterday that he says he wrote more than 20 years ago and never published before. “It describes another controversy about safety sex, like we are experiencing today with Covid . . . I have edited it somewhat, but there are no hyperlinks and some of the information could be dated.”

Two quotes:

“If one has sex through this true love it is really safe.  The other would never put you at risk by being diseased.  In fact you would know him so well to be sure he was disease free.  You would not feel the slightest risk of abandonment because you were really sharing one life, not passing fluids between two passing lives.  This love is usually anointed by society through the institution of marriage.”

“Of course we cannot expect to find the perfect love very often.  Yet I think it is better to try and achieve some aspect of Eros and Agape than to simply submit to our animal instincts.  Contraceptives, in a profound way, have broken our society by allowing us to act on our instincts without feeling the immediate effects of our actions.  Furthermore, they have added to a culture which rates sex as the highest order of life, greatly demeaning life.  For these reasons I believe contraceptives can never provide safe sex.”

The full article is here.

The unbearable smugness of the Netflix elites

'Don’t Look Up' is a preposterous movie that is wrong about everything.

Brendan O’Neill has written a devastating critique of a film I hadn’t even heard about before I saw his article. However, it’s important to know about it because it appears to exemplify how not only “the media” tries very hard to influence our thinking, and not only the big tech companies try very hard to keep us shielded from information and opinions that could change our thinking away from what the media wants us to think. It exemplifies how very hard, and very crudely, the entertainment industry tries to influence our thinking as well – instead of simply entertaining us.

Here’s O’Neill’s summary of his article:

Don’t Look Up sums up the unbearable smugness of the Netflix elites, of those West and East Coast cultural movers and shakers who see it as their responsibility to ‘raise the awareness’ of the little people. The makers of this movie really have convinced themselves that they are brave soothsayers who risk being collared by the CIA and capitalism itself for their reckless propagation of The Truth, when in reality they themselves are the new corporate elites who exercise an extraordinary amount of influence over public life in the 21st century. These days, it isn’t ‘denialism’ that is the problem – it’s catastrophism, the view of everything, especially climate change, as a calamity that our hubristic species has brought upon itself. That is the elite consensus opinion right now and, not surprisingly, Netflix, the cultural embodiment of the new elites, is riddled with this decadent, indulgent End of Days hysteria.

Two short statements on Christianity

Star Wars and Western Civilisation

In a recent dialog between Jordan Peterson and Angus Fletcher, who is a Professor of Story Science at Ohio State’s Project Narrative, the world’s leading academic think-tank for narrative theory.

(Fletcher says he is interested in “how stories work in the brain”. He got his PhD from Yale. Apparently, according to Fletcher, all sorts of institutions are very interested in the research of his project, it is “backed” by leading neuroscientists and psychologists, doctors, nurses, social workers. Fair enough. But he also mentions as backers: big business, the US army, the special operations community, the air force. Why in the world would they be interested in “narrative theory”? I have ideas, but won’t speculate here.)

Anyway, two short statements stood out, both made by Jordan Peterson:

  1. Star Wars is “Christianity for atheistic nerds”. It’s “inescapable”.
  2. Christianity provides the narrative that forms the cultural foundation of western civilisation. (This latter is quoted from memory and may be paraphrased, as I didn’t bother writing it down at the time.)

Against Apocalyptic Environmentalism

A discussion between Jordan Peterson and upbeat environmentalist Michael Shellenberger

Jordan Peterson, the celebrated psychologist and campaigner against restricted speech and other forms of censorship, has been back for quite a few months now after a long bout of mental and physical illness. His new, preferred format is long (1 to 2 hours) discussions with people who, like him, have done their homework and have something to say.

His latest discussion is with Michael Shellenberger, author of the book titled “Apocalypse Never”. I’ve watched the whole 1 hour 50 minutes of the conversation, and here are my notes and impressions of it. (I don’t claim my rendition is exhaustive. However, I think it provides a good idea of what was said.)

First of all: What a blessing it is, and how refreshing, in this age of quick memes, talking points and “cancellations”, to be able to follow two highly intelligent human beings involved in an exchange of ideas, ranging far, wide, and above all, deep, on some highly topical, contentious and relevant issues.

Continue reading →

How to confront cancel culture

Comedian Dave Chappelle shows us

Brendan O’Neill has written a piece about Dave Chappelle. The comedian has recognised something important: The cancel-culture-crowd, which he opposes, want to make the world a better place. They are however going about it the wrong way:

And yet the truthfulness, the compulsion, of Chappelle’s utterance of thoughts and beliefs and jokes that have madly been turned into speechcrimes is unquestionably inspiring. Chappelle, in being Chappelle, shows us how to confront cancel culture. Not by acquiescing to it, of course. That always feeds the beast. The cancelling mob gets fat on apologies. Every public figure’s pleading for forgiveness is blood in the nostrils of the new censors. And not by opposing it just because that’s what your side in the culture war does. Indeed, in his recent podcast chat with Joe Rogan – even rubbing shoulders with Rogan confirms that Chappelle gives very few shits about the cordon sanitaire self-righteous cancellers have erected around certain people and ideas – Chappelle said he understands ‘the ideas behind some of these cancellations’. Cancellers kind of want to make the world a better place, he and Rogan agreed. The problem is that in the process of smashing that which offends them, they undermine the creative process necessary for an art like comedy and deny us the right to hear alternative ideas. Chappelle’s mix of sympathy for and opposition to the cancelling instinct makes him as far from a shit-stirring, ‘feminism is cancer’ grifter as it is possible to get.

In other words, the cancellers want progress, but in actual fact they are creating regress. They are destroying without creating. The way to oppose them is not to mirror their destructive attitude, but to create something better.

By being creative, we are emulating the creativity of God, who is the ultimate Creator. That is what we should be striving for, as our acts of creation allow us to progressively exercise dominion over the earth, as commanded by Him.