- True Geordie Podcast (09/10/2022)
- Eugenics: Flawed Thinking Behind Pushed Science; with Alex Story (06/10/2022)
- The Book of Revelation, Ronaldo and the role of the artist | SpectatorTV (26/09/2022)
Category Archives: Media
Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion
A documentary film about the Covid "vaccine"
“Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion shines a light on Covid-19 vaccine injuries and bereavements, but also takes an encompassing look at the systemic failings that appear to have enabled them. We look at leading analysis of pharmaceutical trials, the role of the MHRA in regulating these products, the role of the SAGE behavioural scientists in influencing policy and the role of the media and Big Tech companies in supressing free and open debate on the subject.
Produced in collaboration with Oracle Films and Mark Sharman; Former ITV and BSkyB Executive and News Uncut, it’s a self-financed, one-hour TV programme, formatted for 2 commercial breaks.”
The UN thinks it “owns the science”
Literally
See here.
Why people don’t admit they’re wrong
The no longer know how to think critically
Todd Hayden has written an article (“Admit You’re Wrong, Or Die“) in which he observes that people are less able to admit they’re wrong than they used to be.
What is this? I am a pretty old guy, and I do remember a time when people were more flexible. Sure, no one likes to admit they’re wrong, but they actually used to do that, at least occasionally.
He looks for reasons:
I will stick to the idea that much of this resistance to absorbing the evidential truth and changing minds accordingly has to do with a decades-long priming. People in general no longer know up from down—as they blindly navigate the bizarre-o streets of the 2000s. Not much that their senses pick up is automatically, as it used to be, identified accurately.
He blames technology:
Anything our senses are asked to evaluate as evidence is rejected as such, like in a magic show. Nothing can be trusted anymore, until some certain type of authority says it can be. There’s the catch.
He also, briefly and obliquely, touches on education:
If you have nearly no system of determining reality (your senses and common sense), and have never been taught to critically think so you can ascertain truth with a blindfold on, then you are going to be looking for someone to whisper in your ear to describe what it is you are looking at but cannot see. [My emphasis, PwG]
I am currently reading a book by Gary North, his last, called “The Biblical Structure of History”, in which he lays out that modern historians, not basing their study on the presupposition of a creator God, have no way of referencing their perception of the past to anything fixed. Therefore, their history becomes something totally random and relative.
This perception of history became dominant soon after the first world war. It has by now percolated throughout society. The result is that people no longer know what to believe, but still must make their way through society and life. And so they latch on to “some certain type of authority” who tells them what’s up and what’s down, what’s right and what’s wrong. No matter how much it contradicts their “common sense”. And they believe it, and act accordingly.
Dr Mike Yeadon – All is planned and they are coming for you
The former lead Pfizer scientist is not joking
Maajid Nawaz interviews Yeadon (1 hour 22 minutes) on everything around the Covid crisis, the government overreaction to it, and the consequences, which are not going to be pretty.
Why Orwell matters
His defence of freedom flies in the face of all that is woke and regressive today.
Article by Bruno Waterfield.
Excerpts:
Totalitarian regimes set about breaking up clubs, trade unions and other voluntary associations. They were effectively dismantling those areas of social and political life in which people were able to freely and spontaneously associate. The spaces, that is, in which local and national culture develops free of the state and officialdom. These cultural spaces were always tremendously important to Orwell. As he put it in his 1941 essay, ‘England Your England’: ‘All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the “nice cup of tea”.’
He was also worried about what he saw as Britain’s leftwing ‘Europeanised intelligentsia’, which, like the Communist Parties of Western Europe, seemed to worship state power, particularly in the supranational form of the USSR. And he was concerned above all about the emergence of the totalitarian mindset, and the attempt to re-engineer the deep structures of mind and feeling that lie at the heart of autonomy and liberty.
Orwell could see this mindset flourishing among Britain’s intellectual elite, from the eugenics and top-down socialism of Fabians, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and HG Wells, to the broader technocratic impulses of the intelligentsia in general. They wanted to remake people ‘for their own good’, or for the benefit of the race or state power.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, this new intellectual elite started to gain ascendancy. It was effectively a clerisy – a cultural and ruling elite defined by its academic achievements. It had been forged through higher education and academia rather than through traditional forms of privilege and wealth, such as public schools.
Orwell was naturally predisposed against this emergent clerisy. He may have attended Eton, but that’s where Orwell’s education stopped. He was not part of the clerisy’s world. He was not an academic writer, nor did he position himself as such. On the contrary, he saw himself as a popular writer, addressing a broad, non-university-educated audience.
Nowadays we are all too familiar with this university-educated ruling caste, and its desire to control words and meaning. . . . [T]hink of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have transformed the very meanings of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, divesting them of any connection to biological reality. Orwell would not have been surprised by this development. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he shows how the totalitarian state and its intellectuals will try to suppress real facts, and even natural laws, if they diverge from their worldview.
This totalitarian approach to history is dominant today, from the New York Times’ 1619 Project to statue-toppling. History is something to be erased or conjured up or reshaped as a moral lesson for today. It is used to demonstrate the rectitude of the contemporary establishment.
But then that was always Orwell’s worry – that intellectuals giving up on freedom would allow a Big Brother Britain to flourish. As he saw it in The Prevention of Literature (1946), the biggest danger to freedom of speech and thought came not from the threat of dictatorship (which was receding by then) but from intellectuals giving up on freedom, or worse, seeing it as an obstacle to the realisation of their worldview.
Orwell was concerned by the increasing popularity among influential left-wing intellectuals of ‘the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness’. The exercise of freedom of speech and thought, the willingness to speak truth to power, was even then becoming seen as something to be frowned upon, a selfish, even elitist act.
Lionel Trilling, another writer and thinker, made a similar point to Self, but in a far more insightful, enlightening way. ‘[Orwell] liberates us’, he wrote in 1952:
‘He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us, he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our lights – he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us.’
Orwell should be a figure for us, too – in our battle to restore the democracy of the mind and resist the totalitarian mindset of today. But this will require having the courage of our convictions and our words, as he so often did himself. As he put it in The Prevention of Literature, ‘To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly’. That Orwell did precisely that was a testament to his belief in the public just as much as his belief in himself. He sets an example and a challenge to us all.
HM the Queen Elizabeth II RIP
Some reactions to the death of Elizabeth II which somehow got overlooked by mainstream media
Nigel Farage pays tribute to the Queen following her passing at the age of 96
Idiots react to the Queen’s death, by Paul Joseph Watson (NB: Some bad language)
Jordan Peterson Comments on the Queen’s Passing
A countercultural queen: Frank Furedi and Brendan O’Neill discuss the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the war on history.
Queen Elizabeth and the End of History, The woke elites’ war on the past is a menace to freedom and democracy. Article by Brendan O’Neill.
Slightly different subject, but still:
Nigel Farage reacts to King Charles III addressing the nation for the first time as monarch
Brainwashing TV Soaps
Video by Paul Joseph Watson
Watson finds himself, or rather his talking points, discussed in soap operas.
How to make the world a better place
Another great talk with Jordan Peterson
A talk with Bjørn Lomborg and Ralph Schoellhammer
Leftist politicians and the “intellectual elite” prioritize a vague plan for saving earth over the lives of struggling people all over the world. Governments are being forced to press their citizens, straining already fragile economic and agricultural systems, in order to appease a globalist utopian vision. Bjørn Lomborg and Ralph Schoellhammer sit down with Dr Jordan B Peterson to discuss the faults in this plan, and the people who are suffering because of it.
Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish author, having written numerous books on climate change such as “False Alarm,” “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” and “How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place.” He is the president of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus Center that focuses on doing the most good, for the most people, with increasingly limited budgets. Previously, Lomborg was the director of the Danish government’s Environmental Assessment Institute.
Ralph Schoellhammer is a scholar and journalist operating in Europe who has diligently covered overlooked stories such as the Dutch Farmers Protest. He is also an assistant Professor of international relations at Webster Vienna Private University, and produces a podcast following political psychology and institutionalism called the Global Wire.
Lockdown and the price of suppressing dissent
In times of crisis, we need more debate – not less
Article by Fraser Myers
Excerpts:
This week, we learned that this shushing of debate and silencing of questions went right to the top of government. Speaking to the Spectator, former chancellor Rishi Sunak claims that even he was unable to get a hearing for his concerns about lockdown.
An omerta on lockdown harms was quickly established in the spring of 2020. Ministers were told not to talk publicly about potential trade-offs. According to Sunak: ‘The script was, oh, there’s no trade-off, because doing this for our health is good for the economy.’
[…]
Although there was an apparent consensus in SAGE in favour of lockdown, Sunak says this isn’t the whole truth. When difficult questions or disagreements were raised in the scientists’ meetings, these were simply edited out of the minutes before they reached ministers. Dissent was excised. It is only because Sunak had a Treasury official listen in to the SAGE calls that he knew there was often a great deal of disagreement and uncertainty among the scientists.
[…]
Many opponents of lockdown suspected that SAGE was being overly alarmist throughout the pandemic, and this was confirmed beyond any doubt in December 2021, when the government defied SAGE’s recommendations and refused to implement new restrictions. A predicted bloodbath of 6,000 deaths per day simply did not materialise.
Throughout the pandemic, the government and the scientists tried to hide their uncertainty. The media demonised dissenters and Big Tech cracked down on them. All of this was apparently to the end of showing a unified front, preserving the integrity of science and pushing a singular, easy-to-follow public-health message. We were essentially told that in times of crisis it is better to put up and shut up than to undermine the authorities.
But look where that has got us. An economic crisis, a health-service crisis and an education crisis are now engulfing the nation – all of which were, at least in part, fuelled by lockdown. We are standing in the smouldering wreckage of our elites’ terrible decisions. We have paid a heavy price indeed for suppressing debate and dissent.