Children, in my sadly limited experience, are one of nature’s conservative forces. Or, they can be. Only after puberty are they likely, in the course of nature, to embrace change. One may glimpse what nature intended by this. Even adolescence has its function. As the child transforms into woman or man, by chemical processes I’d rather not mention, his outlook also changes. He will go out in the world. He still needs protection, but is beginning to forget. He is trying new spiritual garments on for size. He is trying things on, more generally; graduating, perhaps, from mischievous child to the full glory of juvenile delinquency. Or, from obedient and thoughtful child, to discerning and responsible adult.
In the old days, of course (in every culture), adulthood came earlier, and adolescence was merely its apprentice form. Now thanks to an extended, debilitating system of “education”, bureaucratically controlled, adolescence itself, or the semblance of it, may be extended past the age of thirty; and with the further interventions of what I call Twisted Nanny State, from birth (when permitted) to death (however caused). The old notion that one must take responsibility for oneself and in one’s neighbourhood (whatever that may be) has come to be replaced by the new notion that one is the member of a demographic group, to be assigned responsibilities by one’s progressive betters.
David Warren, “Against ‘education'”, Essays in Idleness, 2019-09-06.
March 24, 2024
QotD: Adolescence
March 23, 2024
QotD: The SCIENCE was SETTLED in the 1970s
For younger readers, back in the late 70s the nutritional Powers That Be got in bed with the corn lobby. It sounds funny, but they were and are huge, the corn lobby — why do you think we’re still getting barraged with shit about ethanol, even though it’s actually much worse for the environment than plain ol’ dinosaur juice, when you factor in all the “greenhouse emissions” from growing and harvesting it? Anyway, ethanol wasn’t a thing back then … but corn syrup was, and so suddenly, for no reason whatsoever, the PTB decided that fat was bad and carbohydrates were good.
Teh Science (TM) for this was as bogus and politicized as all the other Teh Science (TM) these days, but since we still had a high degree of social and institutional trust back then — living in a country that’s still 85% White will do that — nobody questioned it, and so suddenly everything had to be “fat free”, lest you get high blood pressure and colon cancer and every other damn thing (ever notice how, with Teh Science (TM), everything they decide is bad suddenly correlates with everything that has ever been bad? Funny, that). But since fat is what makes food taste good, they had to find a tasty substitute … and whaddya know, huge vats full of corn syrup just kinda happened to be there. Obesity rates immediately skyrocketed; who’d have thunk it?
… but again, this isn’t a deliberate thing with your average Leftie. You know how they are about Teh Science (TM), even Teh Science (TM) produced by people who thought polyester bellbottoms were a great look, which alone should tell you everything you need to know. They just learned “red meat is bad”, and so, being the helpful sorts they are, decided to boss you around about it. You know, for your own good.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-25.
March 22, 2024
QotD: Degenerative progressivism
Ghost of a Flea, “Law and order”, Ghost of a Flea, 2005-06-21.
March 21, 2024
Banksy is “a jester to the woke court, the cheeky clown of received opinion”
As a certified curmudgeon, I’ve never seen the attraction of Banksy’s various bits of artistic … whatever it is properly called. At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill helps put Banksy into proper perspective:
I guess it wasn’t enough that us polluting plebs are chided for our transgressions against Mother Nature every time we watch a BBC nature documentary. And by politicians of all persuasions. And by columnists who summer in Tuscany. And by aristocratic arseholes called Edred and Poppy who won’t even let us enjoy the football or the snooker without cutting through the fun with their cut-glass tones to remind us we’re hazardous to Gaia. No, we also have to be walloped with an eco-sermon as we cycle to work down the Hornsey Road.
Unsurprisingly, the elites are lapping up Banksy’s latest missive in spray paint. A Radio 4 expert on Banksy – I’m dying – raved to the BBC that his message is “clear” and it “really resonates”: “Nature’s struggling and it is up to us to help it grow back.” The founder of Haringey Tree Protectors – I’m not making this up – gushed in the Guardian about how Banksy’s “stark image” reminds us that “in the climate crisis we just can’t continue treating our tree canopy with such savagery”. Pruning leaves is barbarism now. You just know that when green-fingered Charles III saw the Banksy pic during his morning peruse of the papers he gave it a kingly nod of approval.
That’s what Banksy is, isn’t it – a jester to the woke court, the cheeky clown of received opinion? He larps as rebellious, sneaking about in the dead of night to put up his technically illegal “art”, but in truth he has not once voiced an opinion that wouldn’t win noisy murmurs of approval at a soirée in Daunt Books. Brexit is bad, Israel is insane, the paparazzi are scum, don’t vote Tory, capitalism is a rat race, Save the Planet – honestly, browsing Banksy’s back catalogue of stencilled eyesores is like being stuck in a lift with one of those craft-beer centrists who says cockwomble a lot.
His Finsbury Park fake tree captures the conformist thinking that hides in his guerrilla-art performance. It’s a public-information campaign masquerading as graffiti. “Save the trees” – Rishi Sunak could say that. He has, in fact. He recently announced a ban on felling trees without “proper consultation”. Banksy’s tree also has that whiff of hysteria that always attends dinner-party efforts to alter the behaviour of the lower orders. The idea that we’re obliterating trees with “savagery” is bullshit. London’s a forest. Literally. The UN defines a forest as anywhere that is at least 20 per cent trees – London is 21 per cent trees. The “world’s largest urban forest”, as Time Out puts it.
So relax, Banksy. Chill in the no doubt cushy pad you bought from selling your graffiti to philistine luvvies. London’s fine. If anything were to make me leave this great city, it wouldn’t be a want of trees but the oversupply of your sixth-former propaganda. Only a few months ago he put up a “STOP” sign in Peckham decorated with three drones to signal his desire for a ceasefire in Gaza. Radical.
Look, it can be irritating when artists decide to épater la bourgeoisie. That slogan, dreamt up by the decadent poets of late 19th-century France, means to take glee in scandalising the middle classes. But surely Banksy’s style of pandering to the middle classes – let’s call it servir la bourgeoisie – is worse? He is simply smuggling the received wisdom of society’s self-styled betters under the cover of edgy graffiti. From his anti-Brexit mural showing a workman sadly chipping one of the yellow stars from the EU flag to his image of Brits pledging their allegiance to the flag of Tesco – consumerism is slavery, y’all – his every utterance is chattering class to the core.
March 20, 2024
Google’s unmissable leftward biases
Tom Knighton on a recent New York Post article calling out Google for their strong political biases and how they inform everything that Google and its subsidiaries and affiliates do:
Once, the company was well-known for having the phrase “Don’t be evil” painted on a wall in their headquarters. It’s a noble sentiment, but apparently, it’s now more like “
Don’tbe evil.”That’s pretty clear after what we learned from the New York Post:
Google has been putting its thumb on the scale to help Democratic candidates win the presidency in the last four election cycles during which it censored Republicans, according to a right-leaning media watchdog.
The Media Research Center published a report alleging 41 instances of “election interference” by the search engine since 2008.
The MRC published a report accusing Google of having “utilized its power to help push to electoral victory the most liberal candidates…while targeting their opponents for censorship.”
The report comes weeks after AllSides conducted an analysis which found that news aggregator Google News skewed even more off the charts in 2023.
Google has also come under fire after its Gemini AI image generator produced “woke”-inspired and historically inaccurate images such as black Vikings, female pope and Native Americans among the Founding Fathers.
Now, Google denies the claims and someone close to the company took issue with the methodology used to detect this supposed interference.
But the truth of the matter is that there’s absolutely no reason to believe Google on this because we’ve seen enough of it previously to know better.
For example, YouTube has a profoundly leftward bias. The site is notorious for silencing right-wing voices while allowing leftists to get away with trampling community standards willy-nilly. YouTube is owned by Google, which means they’re at least tacitly endorsing the strategy.
From there, it’s not difficult to see the mothership taking on a similar role, if not originating it. They’re just able to hide it easier.
But even there, we can see it.
I use Google’s news feed regularly, particularly for my work at Bearing Arms. It’s common for me to look up “gun rights” and the first article that shows up, unless I set it for the most recent stories, be one treating them as a negative thing.
So yeah, I have no doubt that Google is playing favorites.
The worst part is that there isn’t anything that can be done through the legal system as far as I’m aware. But that doesn’t mean someone there didn’t realize what they are doing is wrong.
Most probably didn’t, though. They believe the Holy Progressive Cause is so vital, so unerringly good, that they can and should do anything to serve it. That includes displaying a staggering degree of bias in the service of what you believe to be the greater good, your business be damned.
But they knew it would be considered wrong by a great many people, which is why they’re hiding it.
March 19, 2024
Canada’s new international role: the object lesson in failure and tyranny
Tristin Hopper rounds up some of the foreign impressions of Canada’s descent into the west’s object lesson in what not to do in almost every area:
In just the last week, there have been two separate columns in British newspapers framing Canada as a model of what not to do.
Both were inspired by the tabling of Bill 63, the Liberals’ Online Harms Bill. The Spectator said that it effectively engendered the founding of a Canadian “thought police”. The Telegraph cited it as evidence that “Canada’s descent into tyranny is almost complete”.
This didn’t used to happen. It wasn’t too long ago that Canadian politics were famously inaccessible to the wider world. For Canada’s 2008 federal election, The Spectator covered it with a blog post that mostly mused on how nobody cared. “It’s curious that Canada receives almost no foreign coverage, even in Britain where there are, after all, plenty of people with Canadian relatives or connections,” it read.
But now – on topics ranging from assisted suicide to housing affordability to internet regulation – it’s not infrequent that Canada will be cited in foreign parliaments and in foreign media as the very model of a worst-case scenario.
It was just six months ago that The Telegraph scored a viral hit with a mini-documentary framing the political situation in Canada as a “warning to the West”.
“Under Justin Trudeau, Canada has sought to position itself as the global bastion of progressive politics,” reads a synopsis for the film Canada’s Woke Nightmare, which has garnered more than five million views.
The documentary notes that Canada is now at the absolute global vanguard of progressive issues including harm reduction, assisted suicide and gender ideology.
[…]
If the Online Harms Act is suddenly garnering headlines across the rest of the Anglosphere, it’s not because Canadian politics are inherently interesting to the wider world. Rather, it’s because Bill C-63 – just like any number of Trudeau policies before it – is proposing to do things that no other Western democracy has yet proposed.
While plenty of Canada’s peer countries have hate speech controls, Bill C-63 was able to raise even European eyebrows with life sentences for “advocating genocide”, and a provision for police to mandate house arrest merely on suspicion that a Canadian was likely to commit a hate crime.
The Wall Street Journal, for one, profiled the bill as a real-life example of the 2002 film Minority Report, which depicts a dystopian future in which citizens are jailed for “pre-crime”.
Or in the critical words of The Spectator, “this legislation authorises house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future crime … if that’s not establishing a thought police, I don’t know what is”.
March 18, 2024
QotD: Self-hatred (aka “false consciousness”)
Cathy Young, “When Jews wax anti-Semitic”, Boston Globe, 2005-02-07.
March 17, 2024
Problematic art, again
David Thompson calls to our attention yet another outbreak of problematic racist white supremacy in … landscape paintings?
Hampstead Heath by John Constable, 1820.
Above, John Constable’s Hampstead Heath, circa 1820. Beware its morally corrupting influence.
The problem, we’re told, is that paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are “leaving very little room for representations of people of colour”. And obviously, even the past must be made “inclusive and representative”. Which seems to mean that we must all pretend that our islands’ population and cultural assumptions have always looked like those of, say, twenty-first century London, a city whose demographics bear little relationship to those of the country as a whole, even in the twenty-first century.
It occurs to me that notions of racial “representation” will likely be distorted by the embrace of rather parochial progressive conceits, and by proximity to the nation’s capital, which in my lifetime has gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%, and which is wildly out of step with the rest of the nation. Things that are denounced as “horribly white”, or whatever the current term of disapproval is, may not seem so to people who live in, say, Chesterfield or Plymouth.
But apparently, museum visitors must be warned that the sight of a Constable landscape may trigger TERRIFYING BLOOD AND SOIL TENDENCIES. Or at least inspire thoughts of historical attachment, continuity, and belonging – thoughts that may be disconcerting or very much frowned upon, if only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.
March 15, 2024
Woke Shakespeare?
Andrew Doyle wonders if even the Bard can survive the incessant assaults of the ultra woke, the new Puritans:
This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.
The puritans had it in for Shakespeare. With the exception of the plague, they were perhaps the most persistent threat to his livelihood. As far as these zealots were concerned, the theatre was a realm of “adulterers, adulteresses, whoremasters, whores, bawds, panders, ruffians, roarers, drunkards, prodigals, cheaters, idle, infamous, base, profane, and godless persons”.
These were the words of the polemicist William Prynne from his Histrio-Mastix (1633). He was eventually to get his way in 1642 when the puritan-led parliament shut the theatres down. When the ban was lifted on the accession of Charles II, older plays had to be dusted off to satisfy the public’s appetite for drama. It was Shakespeare’s work that proved to be the most popular, establishing a trend that has never waned.
Now the bard faces another breed of puritan, more censorial than the last. We are living in conformist times, and inexplicably those in the creative arts have turned out to the be most conformist of all. Nowhere is this more evident than the theatre industry, where wrongthink is outlawed and artistic freedom is sacrificed on the altar of identity politics. Virtually all productions of Shakespeare’s plays I have seen in recent years have been mangled to promote the regressive fashions of our time. Today’s audiences are seeing a vague shadow of these masterworks through a narrow and uninspiring prism.
Even so, many of us are reluctant to give up on the theatre altogether. We tolerate the gender-neutral toilets that nobody asked for, the rainbow lanyards worn by ushers, and the little sermons in the programmes by directors who think their job is to educate the masses. One friend remarked that so long as the preaching only amounts to 20% of the show’s content, he is willing to accept it. I suppose it’s like going for dinner in an especially pious household, and having to put up with a long-winded prayer before a delicious meal.
Theatregoers might have a better experience if they opt for productions of plays written many years before this new state religion took hold. Shakespeare, as a playwright who has never been bettered, is surely the safest choice. In his work we find ourselves unmolested by ideology. We know nothing of Shakespeare’s opinions on matters of politics or religion, and attempting to glean any suggestions from his works is futile. I think A. L. Rowse put it best when he pointed out that Shakespeare “saw through everybody equally”. Neither prince nor pauper escapes his sceptical gaze.
March 14, 2024
“The dark world of pediatric gender ‘medicine’ in Canada”
The release of internal documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) revealed just how little science went into many or most juvenile gender transitions and how much the process was being driven politically rather than scientifically. Shannon Douglas Boschy digs into how the WPATH’s methods are implemented in Canada:
An undercover investigation at a Quebec gender clinic recently documented that a fourteen-year-old girl was prescribed testosterone for the purpose of medical gender transition within ten minutes of seeing a doctor. She received no other medical or mental health assessment and no information on side-effects. This is status quo in the dark world of pediatric gender “medicine” in Canada.
On March 5th Michael Shellenberger, one of the journalists who broke the Twitter Files in 2022, along with local Ottawa journalist Mia Hughes, released shocking leaks from inside WPATH, the organization that proclaims itself the global scientific and medical authority on gender affirming care. The World Professional Association of Transgender Health is the same organization that the Quebec gender clinic, and Ottawa’s CHEO, cite as their authority for the provision of sex-change interventions for children.
These leaks expose WPATH as nothing more than a self-appointed activist body overseeing and encouraging experimental and hormonal and surgical sex-change interventions on children and vulnerable adults. Shellenberger and Hughes reveal that members fully understand that children cannot consent to loss of fertility and of sexual function, nor can they understand the lifetime risks that will result from gender-affirming medicalization, and they ignore these breaches of medical ethics.
The report reveals communication from an “Internal messaging forum, as well as a leaked internal panel discussion, demonstrat(ing) that the world-leading transgender healthcare group is neither scientific nor advocating for ethical medical care. These internal communications reveal that WPATH advocates for many arbitrary medical practices, including hormonal and surgical experimentation on minors and vulnerable adults. Its approach to medicine is consumer-driven and pseudoscientific, and its members appear to be engaged in political activism, not science.”
These findings have profound implications for medical and public education policies in Canada and raise serious concerns about the practices of secret affirmations and social transitions of children in local schools.
These leaks follow on the recent publication of a British Medical Journal study (BMJ Mental Health), covering 25-years of data, dispelling the myth that without gender-affirmation that children will kill themselves. The study, comparing over 2,000 patients to a control population, found that after factoring for other mental health issues, there was no convincing evidence that children and youth who are not gender-affirmed were at higher risk of suicide than the general population.
In the last week, a second study was released, this one from the American Urology Association, showing that post-surgical transgender-identified men, who underwent vaginoplasty, have twice the rate of suicide attempts as before affirmation surgery, and showing that trans-identified women who underwent phalloplasty, showed no change in pre-operative rates of suicide and post-operative.
These and other studies are now thoroughly debunking the emotional blackmail myths promoted by WPATH, that the absence of sex-change interventions, suggest that gender-distressed children are at high risk of taking their own lives.
March 11, 2024
Google’s “wild success and monopolistic position has made it grow fat, lazy, and worst of all, stupid”
Google has long been the 500lb gorilla in the room as far as search engine dominance is concerned, despite a significant and steady drop in the quality of the search results it returns. Niccolo Soldo suggests that Google has gotten fat and lazy in the interval since the release of its last huge success — Gmail — and the utter catastrophe of Gemini:
It’s become passé to complain about Google’s search engine these days, because it’s been horrible for years. We all recall its early era when its minimalist presentation effectively destroyed its competition overnight. Only us olds remember AltaVista‘s search engine, for example. So ubiquitous is its core function that the word “google” entered our lexicon.
Roughly 85-90% of the readers who have subscribed to this Substack have used a gmail address to do so. It’s a great product, although it could be better. Like many of you, I have several gmail addresses, and use email services from other providers like Protonmail. Gmail is incredibly easy to use, and works very well on all the devices that we operate on a daily basis.
Google is a tech behemoth, and is in a monopolistic position when it comes to both of these services. It has used this position to hoover up an insane amount of cash, taking a battering ram to many other businesses in the process, especially news media outlets that rely on advertising revenue. Yet it has not scored any big victories since its rollout of gmail all those years ago. Pirate Wires says that it hasn’t had to for some time … until now. The explosion of AI tech means that its core business is now at threat of extinction unless it can win the AI arms race. Its first foray into this war via its rollout of Gemini has been an absolute disaster. Mike Solana chalks it up to many factors, primarily the “culture of fear” that seems to permeate the tech giant.
The summary:
Last week, following Google’s Gemini disaster, it quickly became clear the $1.7 trillion-dollar giant had bigger problems than its hotly anticipated generative AI tool erasing white people from human history. Separate from the mortifying clownishness of this specific and egregious breach of public trust, Gemini was obviously — at its absolute best — still grossly inferior to its largest competitors. This failure signaled, for the first time in Google’s life, real vulnerability to its core business, and terrified investors fled, shaving over $70 billion off the kraken’s market cap. Now, the industry is left with a startling question: how is it even possible for an initiative so important, at a company so dominant, to fail so completely?
The product rollout was so incredibly botched that mainstream media outlets friendly to Google (and its cash) are doing damage control on its behalf.
Gemini’s ultra-woke responses to requests quickly became a staple of social media postings.
Multiple issues:
This is Google, an invincible search monopoly printing $80 billion a year in net income, sitting on something like $120 billion in cash, employing over 150,000 people, with close to 30,000 engineers. Could the story really be so simple as out-of-control DEI-brained management? To a certain extent, and on a few teams far more than most, this does appear to be true. But on closer examination it seems woke lunacy is only a symptom of the company’s far greater problems. First, Google is now facing the classic Innovator’s Dilemma, in which the development of a new and important technology well within its capability undermines its present business model. Second, and probably more importantly, nobody’s in charge.
It’s human nature to want to boil issues down to one single cause of factor, when it’s usually several all at once. We humans also have a strong tendency to zoom in on one factor when presented with many, mainly because the one that we focus on is something that we know and/or are passionate about.
Of course, Google’s engineers didn’t do this accidentally. They’ve been very intently observed by the most woke of all, the HR department:
As we all know, HR Departments are the Political Commissars of the Corporate West.
Stupid stuff:
Before the pernicious or the insidious, we of course begin with the deeply, hilariously stupid: from screenshots I’ve obtained, an insistence engineers no longer use phrases like “build ninja” (cultural appropriation), “nuke the old cache” (military metaphor), “sanity check” (disparages mental illness), or “dummy variable” (disparages disabilities). One engineer was “strongly encouraged” to use one of 15 different crazed pronoun combinations on his corporate bio (including “zie/hir”, “ey/em”, “xe/xem”, and “ve/vir”), which he did against his wishes for fear of retribution. Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of “inclusivity” (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group). There’s no shortage of DEI groups, of course, or affinity groups, including any number of working groups populated by radical political zealots with whom product managers are meant to consult on new tools and products.
March 9, 2024
Titania McGrath – From parody to prophecy
Andrew Doyle‘s imaginary Social Justice Warrior known as Titania McGrath was created as a satire on some of the more extreme goings on among SJWs … today, her work can be seen as amazingly accurate prophecy of how our culture has deteriorated thanks in no small degree to the very, very woke:
“Titania McGrath” and Andrew Doyle
Today is the fifth anniversary of the publication of Titania McGrath’s acclaimed book Woke: A Guide to Social Justice. I created this intersectional activist and slam poet in order to satirise this new intolerant and authoritarian identity-obsessed religion and its stranglehold on society. Having seen so many posh and entitled activists berating working-class straight white people for their privilege, I could think of no more appropriate reaction than mockery. Even Harry Windsor was at it. And he’s an actual prince.
Five years on, and I cannot decide whether I find it funny or depressing that so many of Titania’s ideas in that book ended up becoming reality. Nothing that Titania was ever able to suggest has not eventually been outdone by real-life activists. It is as though they were reading her book for inspiration.
For instance, in a chapter from Woke entitled “Towards an Intersectional Socialist Utopia”, Titania makes the following observation:
Capitalism, after all, is a singularly male phenomenon. The ultimate symbol of capitalism, the skyscraper, is nothing more than a giant cock on the horizon, fucking the heavens.
Sixteen months after the book was published, this article appeared in the Guardian:
Or what about this passage from a chapter in Woke called “White Death”? Here, Titania calls out Hellen Keller for her white privilege:
Consider, if you will, the example of white American author Helen Keller (1880–1968). Even though she was left deaf and blind following an illness as a baby, she still managed to study for a degree, write twelve books and travel the world to give lectures. This kind of privilege is staggering.
Compare this with an article that appeared in Time magazine over a year later, in which the author writes:
However, to some Black disability rights activists, like Anita Cameron, Helen Keller is not radical at all, “just another, despite disabilities, privileged white person”, and yet another example of history telling the story of privileged white Americans.
And how about this tweet from October 2019, in which Titania had some advice for dog owners:
The subsequent outrage ensured that the tweet went viral. And just a couple of months ago, a leading pet talent agency in the UK called Urban Paws was asking owners whether their cats or dogs identified as “gender neutral” or “non-binary”.
After the backlash, the company claimed that it was a mistake. But the specific addition of a “gender identity” category on an application is hardly the equivalent of a typo.
March 8, 2024
How the elites used bait-and-switch tactics to sell the idea of “15-minute cities”
In The Critic, Alex Klaushofer outlines how the Oxfordshire County Council introduced the 15-minute city nonsense for Oxford:
This time last year I watched with bemusement as a strange new trend emerged in my native Britain. Councils were introducing restrictions on citizens moving about by car. Living in Portugal had given me an observer’s detachment and I struggled to reconcile what I was seeing with the country I knew.
Oxford — my alma mater and the city where I regularly used to lose my bicycle — was at the heart of it. In November 2022, Oxfordshire County Council approved an experimental traffic scheme in a city notorious for congestion. Traffic filters would divide the city into zones, with those wishing to drive between them obliged to apply for permits.
Residents would be allocated passes for up to 100 journeys a year and those living outside the permit area 25. The zones would be monitored by automatic number plate recognition cameras and any journeys taken without permits would result in fines.
Duncan Enright, the councillor with responsibility for travel strategy told the Sunday Times the scheme would turn Oxford into a 15-minute city: “It is about making sure you have the community centre which has all of those essential needs, the bottle of milk, pharmacy, GP, schools which you need to have a 15-minute neighbourhood”.
The explanation didn’t make sense. The council was presenting a scheme centred around restrictions on the movement of vehicles on the basis of something quite different: the desirability of local facilities. It was part of a plan for a “net zero transport system” which included a commitment to “20-minute neighbourhoods: well-connected and compact areas around the city of Oxford where everything people need for their daily lives can be found within a 20-minute walk”.
Yet the Central Oxfordshire Travel Plan made no provision for new services or even assessing existing amenities. Instead, flourishing neighbourhoods were to be achieved by the simple expedient of making it difficult for people to drive across the city. Residents, visitors and businesses would make only “essential” — the word was highlighted in bold — car journeys. And while they would still be able to enter and exit Oxford via the ring road, “a package of vehicle movement restrictions” would “encourage” people to live locally.
Traffic management or social engineering? The council’s plan looked like a case of bait-and-switch: citizens were being enticed to accept one thing on the promise of another. And, judging by the increasing revenues other councils were collecting through cameras, the scheme would be a nice earner.
The vast amount of media coverage on 15-minute cities fuelled the fundamental confusion at the heart of the Oxford scheme. Instead of examining its implications, journalists characterised those questioning the proposals as “conspiracy theorists” who were wilfully refusing leafy roads and local markets. “What are 15-minute cities and why are anti-vaxxers so angry about them?” ran a headline in The Times.
The Guardian published a piece titled “In praise of the 15-minute city” which mocked “libertarian fanatics and the bedroom commentators of TikTok”, claiming they belonged to an “anti-vaccine, pro-Brexit, climate-denying, 15-minute-phobe, Great Reset axis”. What had happened to the newspaper I’d read for decades and on occasion written for, with its understanding of the effects of policies on ordinary people?
The public debate around the Oxford experiment completely bypassed the obvious practicalities. What about a typical family, juggling work with school runs and after-school activities? Having to drive out of the city and around its periphery for each trip could make their lives impossible. How would those whose work wasn’t accessible by public transport manage on the two permitted journeys a week?
March 7, 2024
The WPATH to danger … for children and teens
Andrew Doyle outlines the exposure of internal communications from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) showing some extremely concerning things about the organization and the political agenda of many of its members:
The ideological march through the medical institutions was rapid and unexpected. In recent years, we have seen leading paediatric specialists asserting that children who say they are “in the wrong body” must have their feelings immediately affirmed. We have been told that if a boy claims to be a girl, or vice versa, they must be believed and fast-tracked onto a pathway to medicalisation: first puberty blockers, then cross-sex hormones, and in some cases irreversible surgery.
This worldwide medical scandal has disproportionately impacted gay, autistic, and gender non-conforming children. Where clinicians should have been looking out for the interests of the vulnerable, they have been encouraging them to proceed with experimental treatments. Few people would have imagined that mutilating children to ensure they better conform to gendered stereotypes would one day be considered progressive. But here we are.
Much of the responsibility must lie in the hands of WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health), a US-based organisation established in 1979 that is recognised as the leading global authority in this area. WPATH has pushed for the normalisation of the “gender-affirming” approach, and its “Standards of Care” have formed the basis of policies throughout the western world, including in the NHS.
But in an explosive series of leaked files, the credibility of WPATH might now be irreparably shattered. Whistleblowers have provided author and journalist Michael Shellenberger with videos and messages from the WPATH internal chat system which suggest that the health professionals involved in recommending “gender-affirming” healthcare are aware that it is not scientifically or medically sound. A full report has been written by journalist Mia Hughes for the Environmental Progress think-tank. The title is as chilling as its contents: The WPATH Files: Pseudoscientific Surgical and Hormonal Experiments on Children, Adolescents, and Vulnerable Adults.
Some of the leaked internal messages are astonishing in their disregard for basic medical and ethical standards. For all that paediatric gender specialists have publicly stated that there is a consensus in favour of the “affirmative” model, that it is evidence-based, and that it is safer than a psychotherapeutic alternative, their private conversations would seem to suggest otherwise.
There are messages in the WPATH Files proving that surgeons and therapists are aware that a significant proportion of young people referred to gender clinicians suffer from mental health problems. Some specialists associated with WPATH are proceeding with treatment even for those who cannot realistically consent to it. After all, how could a pre-pubescent or even adolescent child fully grasp the concepts of lifelong sterility and the loss of sexual function? As one author of the WPATH “Standards of Care” acknowledges in a leaked message:
[It is] out of their developmental range to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them. They’ll say they understand, but then they’ll say something else that makes you think, oh, they didn’t really understand that they are going to have facial hair.
Or what about the endocrinologist who admits that “we’re often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet”? And these are the very patients who have been approved for potentially irreversible procedures.
March 5, 2024
Our “transnational” “elites” naturally hate anything smacking of populism
Niccolo Soldo’s weekend post discussed some of the reasons western “elites” treat anything that can remotely be considered “populist” as if it were outright armed revolution in the streets:
For around 15 years now, the British have elected Conservatives to govern them, with anti-immigration sentiment the key driver in their choice of parties to rule. #Brexit was powered to victory by this same sentiment.
Instead of getting what they wanted, immigration in the UK has continually increased under each and every Tory Prime Minister. Last week, the ruling Conservatives managed to put out two messages on this same issue:
- Putin has “weaponized migration” to harm Europe, including the UK
- The massive spike in immigration that the UK has experienced since #Brexit was “unintentional” on the part of the Tories
Throughout the West, citizens are becoming increasingly suspicious of liberal democracy because they realize that no matter who they vote for, they always end up getting the same policies to them (yes, this is a gross generalization … please forgive me). It’s not just that people feel that their interests are not being represented by their elected representatives, but that their ruling elites are becoming increasingly distanced from the people that they purport to represent. The sentiment is growing that we are ruled by managers, and that we, the people, really do not have a say in anything.
For those of us who grew up in the West, democracy is part of our DNA. We live and work under the assumption that government rules on behalf of us, the people, and not lord over us, the peons. All of us now realize that the latter is much more true than the former, which is why you choose to read people like me. Very few of us feel that we have the ability to affect the decisions that impact us on a daily basis and that will direct our futures, and the futures of our families. We all have a stake in our respective societies, but feel powerless to do anything about our present situation.
He then linked to this article by Frank Furedi:
Since the turn of the 21st century populism has emerged as a medium through which the Western Elites recycle their worst fears. In the mainstream media populism serves as a signifier of a dark, potentially dangerous force that undermine the stable political institutions that were carefully nurtured in the post-Second World War Era. That is why terms like extreme, far-right, authoritarian, xenophobic and even fascist are often coupled with the word populist. The semantic strategy for framing populism as the antithesis of democratic and liberal norms is to create a moral distance between it and the rest of society.
The representation of populism as a moral disease is frequently communicated through a hysterical narrative about the scale of the threat it represents. Populism is sometimes medicalised as a virus. The growth of a political movement designated as populist is sometimes likened to an infection. Its growth is described as an epidemic by some of its opponents. “The next epidemic: resurgent populism” warns one analyst. “Populism, racism and xenophobia have infected Europe” asserts a writer in Euractiv. One American academic writes of “Populism as a Cultural Virus”. An essay on the Spanish political party Vox is titled, “A Political Virus? VOX’s Populist Discourse in Timed of Crisis”. A Facebook Post of the Young European Federalist stated that “The virus of populism, racism, xenophobia has affected Europe”.
Otto English, a commentator in Politico wrote hopefully that “Coronavirus’ next victim” would be “Populism”. Others were more circumspect and reported that “Covid-19 has not killed Global Populism”.
The use of a medicalised narrative that diagnosed populism as a form of moral pathology is reminiscent of the use of crowd psychology in the 19th century to de-legitimate the democratic aspiration of the people. The demonisation of the masses in the 19th century anticipates the contemporary pathologisation of populism. Crowd psychologists such as Gustave Le Bon wrote off the people as a mass of irrationality and delusion. Then and now the medicalisation of public life expressed an elite’s hatred of those members of their “social inferiors” who dared to challenge their power.
In recent years optimistic predictions about the demise of populism runs in parallel about doom laden accounts of the threat posed by this supposedly dangerous political force. “Has Europe reached peak populism?” asked Paul Taylor in Politico before hopefully noting that the “tide may have turned against nationalist right”. In recent months such hopes have turned into despair as it becomes evident to all that movements labelled as populist are in ascendant. The June elections to the European Parliament are likely to see a substantial increase in the number of parliamentarians affiliated to populist parties. It is unlikely that the dehumanising language of virology is going to do much to discredit the forward movement of populism.
Anti-populist sentiments are particularly prevalent among the oligarchy that runs the European Union. They refuse to regard populist parties as legitimate political opponents. Instead, they treat them as enemies rather than political opponents, The EU financially supports projects designed to curb the epidemic of populism. One such project titled, “Countering the populist threat: policy recommendations and educational tools” is justified on the ground that “populist sentiments and politics are spreading across Europe, dividing society into ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. It describes itself as an ‘An EU-funded project’, which ‘addresses this challenge, thereby ensuring stability of liberal democracies'”.
