‘Nudge’ has no place in our democracy

Rampant fear-mongering was intentional, admits one of the co-founders of the Behavioural Insights Team

Frank Furedi comments in spiked-online.com:

Behavioural science, aka ‘nudging’, has been used by the government during the pandemic to scare people into doing the ‘right’ thing. This insidious development has even been acknowledged by Simon Ruda, one of the co-founders of the Behavioural Insights Team, aka the Nudge Unit, which is part-owned by the UK government. He wrote that the ‘most egregious and far-reaching mistake made in responding to the pandemic has been the level of fear willingly conveyed [to] the public’.

He continues:

And here we come to the principal problem – namely, that nudging is fundamentally anti-democratic. Behavioural scientists start from the assumption that human beings cannot be trusted to make rational choices. People’s behaviour, they conclude, should be the subject of government management. They treat people’s emotional lives, lifestyles and relationships as legitimate objects of policymaking and professional intervention.

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.

Stigmatisation and dehumanisation of the unvaccinated

The world has indeed been hypnotized into a state of mass psychosis, says Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet

“You know you’ve entered a twilight zone of insanity when a police officer tells you you’re a criminal simply because you’re unvaccinated. That’s exactly what happened the other day in Germany. The police officer insisted the unvaccinated man was “a murderer” because he “might infect someone,” and that he’s “not a human.””

Continue reading (and watch the embedded films) here.

Mass Formation Psychosis

The inventor of the mRNA vaccine technology on the state of the world

One of the most trustworthy people in the whole pandemic must be Robert W. Malone MD. He is no-one less than the inventor of the mRNA vaccine technology.

However, he has fallen out of favour with the powers that be, because he has, as Monica Showalter puts it in a recent article on “American Thinker”,

pointed out that many of the more insane and counterproductive public health measures going around have been brought on by conflicts of interest and a revolving door between medical researchers, Big Pharma, and public health officials. Profit motives are quite operative.

For that sin, he has now been banned on Twitter, and searches for him on Google are biased against him.

On his own website, Malone prominently states:

As the original “inventor” of mRNA and DNA vaccines … I am concerned about how the technology is being developed and implemented.

And now, someone has compiled a very effective video of a talk he recently gave on where Malone thinks the world is heading. In short, the world is in what he calls a “mass formation psychosis”. It’s a bit frightening, but, as he points out, not all is lost.

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.

Do not be afraid

The most frequently repeated commandment in the Bible

In this time of fearmongering, it is important to remind oneself that God loves us and wants our best. Especially at a time when we are stepping into the unknown.

I recently discovered the hymn with this title, Do Not Be Afraid. Here, it is sung and presented most beautifully by the singer Marilla Ness. The hymn is based on Isaiah 43.

Happy New Year.

Rendering to Caesar what is God’s

The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Manchester

Justin Welby, the current Archbishop of Canterbury and thus the leader of the world-wide Anglican community, has said that “turning down the jab [anti-covid vaccine] violates the principle of “loving thy neighbour””.

No hint of a sense of 1 Corinthians 6: 19-20, which goes like this:

Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honour God with your bodies.

Regarding the Archbishop’s pronouncement, Breitbart Europe reports:

Responding to the pronouncement, Church of England curate Jamie Franklin told Breitbart London: “I think the archbishop’s comments betray a total lack of understanding of the objections to the COVID-19 vaccine which include safety concerns, concerns about the use of aborted foetal tissue in the development of said vaccines, and concerns about the use of coercion, scapegoating and persecution of those who are deemed to be non-compliant.

“The archbishop also appears completely unconcerned about the emergence of a biosecurity state in which the government has arrogated to itself the power to mandate medical treatments for its citizens, thereby fundamentally altering the nature of the relationship between the individual and the state,” Franklin added.

The Church of England curate, who hosts the Irreverend podcast, went on to say: “Many people are finding it more and more difficult to believe in the narrative pedalled by the government and corporate media and are wondering what on earth is going on.

“The archbishop’s comment do not address any of these concerns and his repeated use of the phrase love your neighbour’ is a misnomer in this context.”

Here is a study from 30th April 2021 showing that there are “breakthrough cases”. That the vaccine does not protect against infection or transmission. The ABC should have known this by December, and probably did.

The other leading churchman who recently got Christian faith disastrously wrong is David Walker, the Bishop of Manchester. On “Thought for the Day” today on the BBC Radio 4 Today program, he said that he had cancelled a number of Christmas events (I paraphrase from memory) “not to protect the attendees, who would have been healthy and strong, but someone who wouldn’t have attended, living far away, maybe on the other side of the world.”

Let me translate this: “In order to stop dying, we must stop living.”

It sounds to me very much like the promise of the serpent in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:4): “You will not certainly die . . . you will be like God.”