Raise your vision above the trees, and you might see the rotten wood

Data dystopia, monetised caution & the strangled Voyager Gene

Yesterday I spent two hours going through the ‘trash’ section of my comments thread….doing so because of persistent complaints that people found it hard (bordering on impossible) to post at The Slog.

This was an obvious thing to do, and I should have done it a year ago at least. It’s just that – paying as I do a premium to be hosted by ‘good guys’ WordPress – I felt sure they wouldn’t be behind it; rather, I saw it as incompetence and under-investment in software.

They obviously were behind it, because 90+% of the comments were anti-Reset and Covidiocy. Sorry, but that’s too much of a coincidence to be true.

There were 18 avid, fecund followers in there, and I’ve countermanded the ‘block user’ smear that had been put on all of them. Particularly missed is HieronimusB, a wise and funny bloke who obviously gave up the ghost in the end. So if you’re still lurking HB, please come back.

All I can say to the aggrieved is that I never saw the comments….and we are all victims of ever-present surveillance derived from Data Dystopia. God help me, I was too trusting.

I know from bitter experience the risks of moving from one host to another. Whatever any of them claim, the oink-piggy in the middle of the process is Google, and its monopolous ability to slow down and/or vapourise one’s followers.

The only way with these people is to seek Personal Destiny Control….but globalism is a multi-headed monster dedicated to smashing that Civil Right.

That said, if you have a foolproof way around the Big Boy Bullies, do please let me know on [email protected].

I’m acutely aware that most Sloggers have little or no interest in footie, but England’s performance so far in the Euros championship is, in reality, more to do with our contemporary culture than the game itself.

Our glorious team topped its Group by winning 1-0 against Romania, 1-0 against Croatia, 1-0 against the Czech Republic, and drawing 0-0 with Scotland. You can start by looking at those results in two ways: first, that England seems to lack firepower; and second, we kept a clean sheet throughout.

I’m a stickler for clean sheets in the bedroom, but on the football field, dirty sheets are more entertaining. I’m thinking 6-2, 5-3, 4-1….that sort of thing. The team’s coach Gareth Southgate – nice man, intelligent, decent, something of a knee-taker – has been in charge now for some five years, and not won anything. This is hardly surprising, given that overpaid foreign players dominate the English Premiership, and thus investment in home-grown talent is woefully poor: England has a second-rate national side now: steady, unlikely to disgrace us, and usually gallant quarter-finalists.

My two problems with all that are as follows. First, Southgate is a cautious man who prefers boring players…..he seems to be a We Mustn’t Lose kind of chap – as opposed to Let’s Entertain the Fans; and second, the media pundits see us do enough to get through to the knockout stage, and rev up the “We can do it, we have kwoli-ee playuz” propaganda. The folks with the enormous bellies in the crowd are, of course, quick to believe this risible jingoism.

The half-time pundits are usually former players seeped in silly jargon and pseudo-science. Players and team formations are variously described as fast on the ground, channeled, professional, overlapping from the back, deadly on the break, intelligent off the ball, comfortable and tackling back. As nobody really expects top-flight footballers to be in slow orbit, tunnelling, amateur, incongruent at the front, scared of skin on the custard, clueless on the ball, consistently itchy and frontally negligent, the punditry is really ordinary people trying to be “experts” in order to avoid the money and old rope accusation. IABATO applies.

England has one world class striker in Harry Kane, but he’s getting on a bit now and Southgate’s team style obviously doesn’t suit him. He is yet to score in the tournament. The other natural front man – Marcus Rashford, young and brilliant when given his head – has trouble getting off the bench, so lacks match experience. In turn, he’s gone all BLM and frankly, there’s nothing worse than a performer/entertainer sleb treating us to his one-dimensional ideas on equality. It bores me and distracts him. France, Germany and Portugal all have more talent and adventure: we may well meet all of them, and as Germany just walloped Portugal 4-2, England are unlikely to progress very far if and when they meet the Wicked Hun.

I invite you to put all this into a CovidUK context.

All the tell-tale signs are there: all British assets sold off or sold out, cautious safety first, systems before personal creativity, persistently misused money, Chris Whitty as the coach, endlessly paranoid caution, pseudo-scientific propaganda, BS-spouting self-assigned experts, unswerving belief among the unwashed, and an attempt to normalise profoundly abnormal tedium.

‘We might lose’ becomes ‘we might die’. ‘We can go all the way’ becomes ‘zero-covid’. ‘Fanzine belief in the team’ becomes ‘the vaccines are safe’. ‘Get behind Gareth’ becomes ‘Get the jab’. And ‘Keep a clean sheet’ becomes ‘wear your mask’.

Above all, focusing one hundred per cent on the epidemiology of the Caution21 football virus is exactly the same as seeing Covid19 as a health issue. In reality, both reflect cultures that have lost the plot on individual freedom, media objectivity and the depravity that always accompanies monied power.

Philip Johnston offers a somewhat different take on this theme in a Telegraph column this morning. Entitled ‘Irrational fear of Covid has crushed Brexit Britain’s buccaneering spirit’, Johnston notes (my emphases):  

‘Despite few hospitalisations and hardly any Covid deaths, the mood remains unremittingly gloomy. Boris Johnson sought to put off summer vacationers by warning of the “hassle and delays” they will face trying to get abroad and back. The autumn, he warned, will bring the twin threat of a rise in Covid and a flu epidemic, the latter compounded by the difficulties in tweaking the annual vaccine to account for mutations. Ministers and scientists shake their heads and say that, while July 19 now looks good for reopening, they can’t rule out more lockdowns if a “rough winter” looms…..Five years after the Brexit vote, the pandemic response has suffocated the boosterism that was one of the driving forces behind the Leave campaign. On our own, freed of the EU straitjacket, we would flourish by demonstrating a quintessentially British can-do spirit. Instead, we are still exhorted to cower behind the national sofa by leaders terrified of what the future might bring.‘

Johnston has always struck me as an honest, talented and decent man, but I think he has it wrong here. He presents a causal relationship between Covid restrictions and the ‘British Spirit’ being dampened. I think the Bulldog approach to ploughing our own furrow disappeared a long time before that. The Contrick19 propaganda succeeded precisely because of that fact: it didn’t suddenly terrify a nation of adventurous go-for-its; rather, it fed easily upon the growth of Groupthink and a cultural loss of the Voyager Gene.

I am certain the Leave side won in the end because those left out (and behind) by metropolitan élite pc arrogance voted four-square to kick the BBC/Muswell Hillbillies in the reproduction equipment. I voted to leave because I had learned the hard way how the Nazified Brussels technocrats think about individual freedom to go about the business of life unharassed by systemically mad denialism. I was, to be sure, utterly atypical.

Indeed, it is through experiencing the very divisive ostracism fuelled by the vaccine fanatics and their antiscience propaganda in the UK that my attitudes have hardened on this question. Apply pain and spread fear among the British majority today, and it becomes rapidly clear that the cultural spine is absent. We are no longer the seagoing nation that went out in search of unknown risks and rewards. Middle England in 2021 not only doesn’t have a Churchill: it wouldn’t allow a Churchill to stand firm and do what’s necessary in the first place. They would’ve caved in 1940.

Nobody in the Boris > Carrie > Hancock > Gove entourage has the nous to devise a post-Brexit export marketing policy. They have the talk, but are paraplegic when it comes to the walk. For Johnson, Brexit was a route to power…..nothing more. For Hancock, the Covid Trojan Horse offers the same outcome. None of these globalist green/monopolist collaborators has the faintest interest in a genuinely independent and self-sufficient mercantile power-house called Britain.

Is there anyone of sound mind that really believes our cacophonous Labour Opposition feels any differently?

If the fighting spirit is still alive anywhere in the United Kingdom, then it exists among those who feel neglected, disenfranchised, angry and suspicious. It’s a demographically eclectic group I grant you….but one that might quickly turn into the basis for a powerful Resistance at ground level.

In real democracies, there are Oppositions. Under oligarchic corporate fascism, one needs Resistances. I see myself as a resistor, and I know perfectly well how minority my position is.

But four concluding points are worthy of consideration. First and foremost, we are not cowards. Second unto that, we represent – in the UK – somewhere between eight and twelve million people. Third, the pandemic narrative needs little more than further damning revelations (and some help from the odd disenchanted MSM journalist) for it to start recognisably coming apart at the seams. And last but far from least, once the bill for this global Reset starts to hit young, working class, entrepreneurial and older pockets, then some degree of positive militancy will rear its head.

John Ward is tired of having to beg for his civil rights.