Exposing the Banality of ESG and the Woke Movement

Laurence Fox with James Lindsay

In this episode of #TheLaurenceFoxShow, Fox and Lindsay dissect the complexities surrounding ESG and the woke movement. Here are the key points covered in this gripping conversation:

Origins of ESG: Uncover the origins and evolution of the ESG framework, examining its impact on business practices, investment strategies, and the broader social landscape.

The Woke Movement Unveiled: Delve into the woke movement, exploring its ideological foundations, cultural influence, and the implications it has on free speech, critical thinking, and societal cohesion.

The Banality of ESG: Expose the inherent banality that underpins the ESG movement, highlighting the potential dangers of reducing complex issues to simplistic metrics and virtue signalling.

Ideological Challenges: Investigate the ideological underpinnings of both ESG and the woke movement, uncovering the potential pitfalls of dogmatic adherence to particular narratives and the suppression of dissenting voices. Critical Analysis and Solutions: Engage in a critical analysis of the ESG and woke phenomena, while exploring alternative approaches that emphasise nuance, individual autonomy, and genuine progress.

Video here. (58 minutes)

The BBC’s position on Climate Change

Established in September 2018

Writes “carbonbrief.org”:

The move follows a ruling earlier this year by Ofcom, the UK’s broadcasting regulator, which found that BBC Radio 4’s flagship current-affairs programme Today had breached broadcasting rules by “not sufficiently challenging” Lord Lawson, the former Conservative chancellor.

Here are the essentials of the ruling:

What’s the BBC’s position?

  • Man-made climate change exists: If the science proves it we should report it. The BBC accepts that the best science on the issue is the IPCC’s position, set out above.
  • Be aware of ‘false balance’: As climate change is accepted as happening, you do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate. Although there are those who disagree with the IPCC’s position, very few of them now go so far as to deny that climate change is happening. To achieve impartiality, you do not need to include outright deniers of climate change in BBC coverage, in the same way you would not have someone denying that Manchester United won 2-0 last Saturday. The referee has spoken. However, the BBC does not exclude any shade of opinion from its output, and with appropriate challenge from a knowledgeable interviewer, there may be occasions to hear from a denier.
  • There are occasions where contrarians and sceptics should be included within climate change and sustainability debates. These may include, for instance, debating the speed and intensity of what will happen in the future, or what policies government should adopt. Again, journalists need to be aware of the guest’s viewpoint and how to challenge it effectively. As with all topics, we must make clear to the audience which organisation the speaker represents, potentially how that group is funded and whether they are speaking with authority from a scientific perspective – in short, making their affiliations and previously expressed opinions clear.

Robert Kennedy Jr exposes the results of the Pfizer trial

I’ve seen this data published before, but it’s worth repeating:

~ 22,000 were injected with the Pfizer vaccine and 22,000 took the placebo (saline)…

~ Results showed the NNTV (Number needed to vaccinate to save one life) was 1 in 22,000…

~ The vaccinated group were 21% more likely to die over the next 6 months from all cause mortality…

~ The vaccinated group was 400% more likely to suffer a cardiac arrest in the next 6 months.

See the short Twitter video here.

The men who joined David

When he was being persecuted by King Saul

All those who were in distress or in debt or discontented gathered around him, and he became their commander. About four hundred men were with him [David].

1 Samuel 22:2

Then he wrote, in Psalm 31:24

Be strong and take heart,
    all you who hope in the Lord.

Deconstructing Marianna in Conspiracyland – Introduction

“Conspiracyland” is a disinformation and propaganda campaign designed to mislead the BBC audience into accepting dictatorship

So says Ian Davis in this article.

Excerpt:

Faced with the prospect of no one bothering to pay for their propagandists, so wedded is the government to ensuring that its BBC “programming” continues that it has frozen the current license fee for two years, in the hope of enticing people to stay, while it desperately tries to figure out how it is going to fund its State media operation.

Currently the proposed government solution looks likely to be a direct tax:

Our evidence was clear that some form of public funding for the BBC remains necessary. [. . .] A universal household levy linked to council tax bills is one option which could take greater account of people’s ability to pay. A ring-fenced income tax is another.

As the effectiveness of its threats and menaces wanes, it is clearly essential, from the government’s perspective, that all choice be removed. Taxation at source has the added advantage of stealing money from people who can’t abide the BBC and wouldn’t choose to support it if you paid them.

Update: Breitbart claims there was a host of disinformation in the first instalment of this program.

How Marxism evolved

Jordan Peterson and James Lindsay discuss

From the video (1 h 50 min) description:

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Dr. James Lindsay break down how Marxism evolved from a singular ideology into a genus, spawning many oppressor/oppressed dogmas across modern culture such as equity, critical race theory, and queer theory. They trace these sub-Marxist doctrines back past fundamental narrative into the theological realm, and detail their utility in the acquisition of power. Dr. Peterson and Dr. Lindsay also discuss the Grievance Studies Affair, of which Dr. Lindsay was a co-author and which casts a spotlight on the Marxist capture of our academic and scientific institutions.

An author, mathematician, and political commentator, Dr. James Lindsay has written eight books spanning a range of subjects including education, postmodern theory, and critical race theory. Dr. Lindsay is the founder of New Discourses, an organization dedicated to shining the light of objective truth in subjective darkness. Dr. Lindsay is the co-author of “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody” and the author of “Race Marxism,” as well as, “The Marxification of Education.” Dr. Lindsay has been a featured guest on Fox News, Glenn Beck, Joe Rogan, and NPR, and he has spoken at the Oxford Union and the EU Parliament.

See also Lindsay’s recent talk in the EU parliament.

It really was just the flu, bro

The Occam's razor explanation for "the pandemic."

Article by Jordan Schachtel.

Excerpts:

At the onset of the covid hysteria era, the “experts” took pains to tell us that this was no ordinary viral outbreak, but a “novel” virus situation that required a novel response, through the infamous “measures” that resulted in the destruction of civilization.

Why was this seasonal respiratory infection outbreak different than any other seasonal respiratory infection outbreak?

First, we were told that the novel virus carried unique symptoms for those burdened by the disease.

But there were no unique symptoms for those burdened by the disease.

According to the CDC, flu symptoms include “fever, cough, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, body aches, headache, chills and/or fatigue.”

According to the CDC, covid symptoms include fever, cough, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, body aches, headache, chills and/or fatigue.

The most common “novel” symptom that was promoted was a temporary mitigation of taste and smell. Weird. Must be a bioweapon or something, right?

Wrong. The loss of taste and smell is common for any and all upper respiratory tract infections.

A day later, Schachtel wrote a follow up entry. Excerpt:

If anything, the lesson to be learned is not to put your trust in the hands of the government, which, either through malice or reckless indifference, encouraged widespread iatrogenic [“medical malpractice”] injury as the solution to a nonexistent pandemic. It wasn’t “the pandemic” that devastated the global economy and wrecked civilization, it was the top-down dictates from above that caused millions of excess deaths worldwide, all to supposedly combat a disease that was not out of the ordinary whatsoever.

The UK’s weather in 2022

A publication by “The Global Warming Policy Foundation”, author: Paul Homewood.

Executive summary
According to the Met Office, the UK climate ‘is continuing to change’, whilst weather is becoming more extreme.
But what does the actual evidence tell us? Using official data up to 2022, from the
Met Office and other sources, this paper examines UK climate trends, and assesses the truth of these claims. The results are as follows:

  • Although 2022 was the warmest on record in the UK, there has been no increase in long
    term averages since the early 2000s.
  • The annual temperature in 2022 was well within the bounds of natural variability, and was
    largely due to long spells of sunny weather in spring and summer.
  • The summer of 2022 was only the fourth hottest, according to the Central England Temperature Record, and not as hot as 1976, 1826 and 2018.
  • Annual rainfall last year was only slightly below average.
  • The number of days with extreme temperatures is not increasing, as fewer cold days are
    offsetting more hot ones.
  • Long-term averages in rainfall in England and Wales, which have been rising since the
    1970s, are similar to the 1870s and 1920s.
  • While winters have become slightly wetter, there is little change in the other seasons. In particular, summers are not getting drier, as projections from climate simulations have suggested.
  • Rainfall is not becoming more extreme, whether on an annual, monthly or daily basis.
  • Sea levels have been rising at approximately 1.7mm per year around the UK, after taking
    account of vertical land movement. There has been no acceleration in the rate of rise on multidecadal scales.
  • Wind storms have been declining in frequency and intensity since the 1990s.

In short, although it is slightly warmer than it used to be, the UK climate has changed very little. Long-term trends are dwarfed by the natural variability of weather. Nor is there any evidence that weather has become more extreme, or will become so in future.

Europe, Immigration, and Merkel’s Christian Values

"Multiculturalism has utterly failed"

Samuel Gregg writes in this commentary, that when Merkel said the above in 2010, she added that “the issue was not “too much Islam” but “too little Christianity.””

Gregg continues: “We have too few discussions about the Christian view of mankind,” Merkel claimed in a recent speech. She then stressed that Germany needs to reflect more upon “the values that guide us, about our Judeo-Christian tradition.” It was one way, Merkel maintained, of bringing “about cohesion in our society.”

Gregg, who at the time of writing was Research Director at the Acton Institute, comments:

Yet it is hardly a secret that the Judeo-Christian heritage sits very loosely on many European societies. We find this in a type of secular-fundamentalism—exemplified by Spain’s current Socialist government—that has become fashionable among sections of the European Left. But the ambiguity also manifests itself in the persistence of historical legends that diminish, distort, and denigrate Christianity’s contributions to European civilization.

A good example is the mythology of the so-called “Dark Ages” that permeates popular and elite discussion of European history. Most of the moral, political, and legal foundations of modern market economies, for instance, were established in Europe well before the sixteenth century. Likewise the scientific method was born in the Middle Ages. Medieval thinkers such as Albertus Magnus made crucial contributions to the development of the natural sciences. Yet despite these facts, many persist in claiming that market economies are essentially a post-Enlightenment phenomenon, or that Christianity is essentially “anti-science.”

But the problem is not only with secular opinion. Since the 1950s, many European Christians have gradually reduced their Christian faith to a vacuous humanitarianism worthy of the best EU-funded NGO. One difficulty with “liberal Christianity” (or whatever’s left of it) is that it isn’t especially interested in affirming any Christian values that go beyond sentimental platitudes about tolerance and equality which are routinely emptied of any specific Christian content. It’s goodbye Thomas Aquinas, hello John Rawls.

This makes it even more ironic that increasing numbers of secular European thinkers believe Europe can only reinvigorate its distinct identity and values through reengaging its Judeo-Christian heritage. This is certainly the conclusion of one of Germany’s most prominent intellectuals, Jürgen Habermas.

A self-described “methodological atheist,” Habermas has been insisting for some time that Europe no longer has the luxury of wallowing in historical denial. As Habermas wrote in his 2006 book, A Time of Transitions: “Christianity, and nothing else [is] the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilization. To this day we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.”

It follows that any serious discussion of Europe’s Christian values in the context of contemporary immigration and identity debates will require many Europeans to go beyond their often-truncated understandings of European history and Christianity. There’s something paradoxical about this being facilitated by the increasing numbers of Muslims living in Europe. But such an engagement is arguably being made even more urgent by the economic reality that Europe will need even more immigrants if its present demographic winter persists for any significant period of time.

What Chancellor Merkel herself understands by “the Christian view of mankind” was not clear from her remarks. Nor is it evident that particular Christian ideas are always compatible with some Muslim positions. Despite the interfaith babble to the contrary, there are some fundamental theological differences between Christianity and Islam, many of which have implications for subjects ranging from religious liberty to the nature of the state. Merkel, however, is undoubtedly correct to insist that any discussion of immigration in Europe should involve Europeans worrying a little less about Islam and paying far more attention to knowing the truth about their own heritage and Christianity’s place in it.

The truth doesn’t just set us free. There’s no future without it.