Who Could Have Seen This Coming?

I keep reminding people: 'freedom of the press' is short for 'freedom of the printing press'. It means anyone is free to publish whatever they want and they don't need some kind of 'printing licence'. 

In other words, despite what the MSM keeps implying, it's the exact opposite of the idea that there is some kind of elite group out there called the 'press' who have special rights not granted to other citizens. There's no legal basis for that belief, but the idea that they're some kind of journalistic jedis is at the heart of why so much modern reporting is awful. Too many of these guys identify more with the people they're supposed to be reporting on than they do with the public they hope will actually buy their lousy papers. 

On the plus side, at least there's some amusement to be found in the outraged reporting every time an MSM journalist is treated like one of the peasantry. 

Here's today's example.

To quote the mighty John McLane: welcome to the party, pal!

Hey, nothing personal - she is one of the least worst journos out there and it's great that the MSM has finally started to talk about this stuff, but Joe Citizen has had to put up with this kind of censorship for years and these guys were fine with that. 

Actually, they were more than fine. No end of ink was spilled on the vitally vital importance of 'clamping down on online extremism'. Now - amazingly - it turns out that 'extremism' turns out to mean 'anything the political establishment doesn't approve of'. Who could have seen that coming? 

Not our professional journaljismers, hence why most people are only now seeing stuff like this:

The Government have been pressurising social media companies to tackle 'false and misleading narratives' about Covid, and through its Rapid Response Unit claims to have 'resolved' 70 such incidents a week.

You know, I can't help thinking that .gov setting up a real life Ministry of Truth might be something worth reporting on even before it started to affect the elect? 

Just a hunch.

And it gets worse. Check out the reporting in the sidebar on the censorship of Lionel Shriver. Not only is she in no way a rhetorical bomb thrower or extremist, the point she was making was both true and useful: obesity increases the risk from the dreaded C-virus. Not only is that true, what if it wasn't? Is YouTube worried people will lose weight unnecessarily and be left with nothing more than a drastically reduced risk of cancer, heart disease and diabetes? 

As I was saying, it's not a conspiracy if it they're doing it openly. 

The Conspiracy Is Already Here

Uh oh.... looks like the MSM drones have decided to flog the whole 'conspiracy theory' dead horse again. 

Here's the thing though. Being a conspiracy nut seems to involve pointing out things that were - until thirty seconds ago - regarded as clear conflicts of interest. 

Meanwhile, the folks who are Following The Science are busy producing the world's worst superhero movie: beware the Slimeinator. 

To borrow a line from the Simpsons: your low-quality CGI says more than real evidence ever could.

That's the thing right there. The Scottish Government makes a propaganda piece but evades restrictions on political advertising on TV by calling it a public health message. Even though it's clearly meant to advocate for a specific policy and everyone knows it.

There's no secret conspiracy to undermine democracy, it's right out there in public. 

When the police kneel before some demonstrators and violently attack others, they're making it pretty clear that this whole 'equal under law' thing is long gone. 

Ditto, when a police officer beats up an old lady on camera with no consequences, then it's clear that whatever the law says about reasonable force, that only applies if you're not judged an enemy of the people. If you are, then paid agents of the state will work you over. 

This is banana republic stuff. 

Forget all the talk of DNA tagging and databases - it might or might not be true but all the key elements of a totalitarian state are already here. Rights for those the Government approves of, a sound beating for those it does not. That's literally what tyranny means. 

Major Disaster Is Not Happy

I take it all back. Professional Conservatives really are more sophisticated and nuanced than the knuckle-draggers in the conservative base. Consider Exhibit A

Hey, I don't mind the colourful language or even the breaches of the code of conduct, but the real obscenity is that it's this that finally brings this guy out of his coma. 

Manchester bombing? Whateva! 

Fellow veterans being targeted with bogus war crimes charges? Zzzzzz 

People opposing Boris Burkas? Unleash the hounds!

You can't even say it's due to the seriousness of the situation itself. Even if we're only talking specifically about the WuFlu, where's the outrage at Public Health England's dog in the manger act, or Professor Pantsonfire Ferguson still having a job?

Nope, nothing to say about any of this apparently. It's just uppity citizens that grinds his gears.  

Maybe this guy's just confused? Maybe he thinks his role is to represent the state and hold the public to account, not the other way round? 

It seems to be a common problem these days. 

Tories Gotta Tory

Shocking news everyone! It turns out that giving that scorpion a ride across the river worked out badly after all. 

Who could have predicted that a famously publicity hungry media luvvie would make like a low-rent Martin Luther as soon as the time was right? 

Oh, yeah, everyone - except the genius set at Conservative Central Office. These guys keep lecturing the supposed knuckle-draggers in the conservative base about the importance of electability, then they go out there and step on a rake. 

And that's not even the worst of it. The whole reason the public gave the Tories an eighty seat majority is disgust with this kind of thing. The Tories were voted in precisely because the public have had enough of Metro-liberals being parachuted into top jobs despite never being elected to a parish council. 

We wanted a change but instead we got Continuity Cameron!

The Empire Has Always Been At War With Eastasia

Good news everyone! It's now legal to say that John Boyega's character in Disney Star Wars was a waste of space.

I wonder what's changed? 

Oh yeah: this

Stunning and brave, you guys! 

Needless to say, some of us pointed his character was worthless *at the time* - and do you know what we got called?

Free clue: it wasn't 'insightful movie critics'.

Lest we forget, Johnny Boy was happy to prop up the phony baloney 'black stormtrooper' nontroversy (it was really phony). He knew exactly why he was hired and he was happy to cash the cheques.

But that was then and this is now.

It takes a lot to make the Demon Mouse look like the good guys, but I think he's managed it! It's right there in his comments about writing black characters.

Huh?

What does that even mean? Was Lando Calrissian a black character? How about Mace Windu? Or were they actually just good characters? Not letting this loser hijack these movies with his racial obsessions may have been the only smart thing Disney actually did.

Just like the old American line about the guy who was born on third base but claims he hit a triple, this guy was given a multi-million dollar participation trophy but now we're all supposed to pretend he was cruelly robed of his shot at an Oscar.

Guardian Writer Outraged By Sexual Non-Harassment

Even an experienced student of leftist pathology such as myself can occasionally be surprised by just how angry leftists get about people minding their own business.

Here's the latest candidate, Laura Bates, feminazi extraordinaire, enraged by the thought of men aggressively and with malice aforethought..... having no interactions with women at all. 

At this point I'm picturing John Cleese's Frenchman in 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail':  Now go away or I shall ignore you a second time.

Besides, I am reliably informed that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle so, you know, swim along Princess!

At this point, you may be thinking 'hey, isn't she the kind of witch who complains about harassment any time a guy so much as looks in her general direction'? 

Yes, yes, she is. In fact, that very article includes a link to another writer whining about 'street harassment' (i.e. member of the lesser sex daring to speak to a princess without written permission in triplicate). Now here's a group of men who aren't harassing, talking to or even acknowledging women in any way... and that's bad too!

I guess what we have her is a lemon-sucking version of Goldilocks: she wants men that don't hit on women too much, or too little, but just the right amount. Either that or it's Schrodinger's Stud, a guy who simultaneously hits on and doesn't hit on women.

Which is actually close to the truth, of course. Schrodinger's Cat sits there patiently, existing in both states right up until his box is actually opened. That's what these hags want: men waiting until the exact moment they're required and then immediately performing whatever service is asked of them with no consideration whatsoever for their own needs or wants.

If you think sexism is a real thing, then that's a thing that's surely sexist.

That's what's really underlying all this. Hence we get paragraphs like this:

It started with rumours: women reporting that men in their offices had suddenly started declining meetings with them or were insisting on leaving the door open. A human resources consultant reported executives telling her that they would no longer get into an elevator alone with a woman. Suddenly, it began to snowball – story after story of men abruptly cancelling business lunches or avoiding women they had previously mentored.

And? Why exactly would men put themselves in harm's way? 

Hey, if talking to a woman in the street is a dreadful imposition, what is the demand that men should be all but forced to have lunch with women?

Just for the sake of this stupid argument, what's the quid pro quo here? Do women have any corresponding  responsibilities to men? At all?

In fact the evil cow can't even keep her story straight. Here's she is at one point complaining about the reaction to MeToo:

Critics claimed that the movement was a pitchfork mob: a “witch-hunt” designed to topple men from their jobs and lives, without so much as an attempt at due process.

Well, yeah! Notably she not only can't explain why that's not true, but only four paragraphs later she has this to say about a doctor worried about false accusations:

His apparent implication that such accusations are simply random, based on no wrongdoing whatsoever, went unchallenged in the piece.

So it's not a witch hunt, but even if you're innocent, you still must have done something to be accused in the first place, am I right girls? 

Reminder: we are in a world where you can get fired for making the Corporate Mean Girls 'uncomfortable'. 

Who - any man, let alone someone who's spent years building a medical career - would risk dealing with a bunch of evil lunatics like this? 

Did I Mention They Hate You?

Why, yes, yes I did. 

And just to ram the point home, here's Julie Burchill confirming that our watchdog media are even more incestuous, corrupt and insular than the political class. 

Apparently, it's super important to name and shame blue collar suspects even when they haven't, strictly speaking, done anything but naming the, actually convicted, pervert friends of La Cosa Media? Not so much. 

Reminder: even on LBC - which markets itself as the voice of the man on the Clapham Ominibus - you can still switch on when you wake up and make it through to lunchtime without hearing a single presenter who's not a public school educated second generation media luvvie. As for the likes of Times Radio and Radio 4....

We should totally give the media a bail out!

Of course, Julie B still can't identify the final piece in the puzzle.  I guess writing for a libertarian site means this whole topic is what artillerymen would call 'Danger Close'. When it comes to nonces, liberals and libertarians all agree that the real issue is the dreadfully unnuanced takes of the lower orders (and, also, they're super sophisticated for refusing to call absolute depravity what it is). 

Using air quotes round perfectly accurate words like evil or pedophile is treated as an actual argument by these hipster douchebags. Meanwhile, wanting predators caged is tacky and crude.... I guess it's  sort of like the super important difference between drinking pints and drinking drams of Old McMolester.

They're smart and you're stupid and that's all you need to know, peasant.

(via Julia)

Hey, Did Someone Say 'Culture War'?

Crikey! Even the squishes are Guido Fawkes are talking about C****** W**. Yep, they've finally noticed that the average university campus is like that line from The Blues Brothers - they have both types of ideology: Blairite and Corbynista.

I'd give them a John McClane style 'welcome to the party, pal' but if you want to know the real reason why  Respectable Conservatives have suddenly decided to start referencing the huge gray thing in the room, take a look at what they posted later in the day.

Yes, indeed. Confidence in scientific advice is collapsing for some reason. We're just lucky that there are no big issues requiring scientific input in this country right now.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, normal people are starting to wonder if there's some kind of connection between the bias in Academia and the terrible quality of its output.

Consider our nation's (apparent) modeler in chief, Neil Ferguson. Looking at his track record, I'm not sure he could predict an uptick in the death rate for members of the avian community in December. More to the point though, his track record is not just bad, it's consistently bad. Basically, he's doing science, but not the sort you can use to predict things or where you need to update your theories if reality keeps letting you down.

You know, that type of science.

Needless to say, I think most of us had worked out the secret of his success even before we got introduced to his bit on the side, Helga von Wokenheit, Head of Globalism at the Global Institute for Globalism.

The point is not just that bias on campus leads to jobs for life for the suitably woke (though it does), or even that bright up and coming conservative academics need to either take a vow of silence or change careers (that's true too), it's that you can't have a healthy intellectual environment where everyone has to carefully walk the tightrope of approved ideology. It's hard to be innovative when out of the box can mean out of a job.

All this just leads to a bigger issue. The genius set at Tory HQ have refused to tackle issues like this on the grounds that they're too dangerous politically. Better just to kick the can down the road.

Hey, how's that working out for you guys?

As Trotsky would say - and he would know - you may not be interested in culture war, but culture war is interested in you. There are real world consequences to letting lunatics take over vital sectors of the country. Never mind whether or not taking on Professor Snootlington is really that high risk politically anyway, the choice is either to face the political risks of meaningful reform or face the political risks of dealing with the inevitable results of a dysfunctional and corrupted system.

Burka Nation

Nope, that's not a fair analogy: a burka is a face-covering inspired by superstitious nonsense whereas Boris-Burkas are worn so that viruses will get blocked by a single layer of cotton...

You know, just like how you can keep wasps out of your back garden by putting up a barbed wire fence.

Really, it's nothing at all like a religious cult in any way whatsoever. 

Besides, you can trust dot gov - look how well their other great ideas work.

Some say this is all down to the collapse in actual, real, religious faith. If this life is all that there is, then the fear of death leads our weaker brethren to worry too worry about maximising the years in their life not the life in their years.

Well, maybe, maybe not, but this is where I came in. We're supposed to sneer at our crazy pants ancestors and their religious hang-ups but I note even Henry VIII didn't insist on muzzling the whole population. Ditto, Queen Mary, Cromwell and James II.

True, Churchill did briefly consider requiring citizens to carry - not wear - their gas masks  everywhere but he dropped the idea as stupid and unworkable.

BTW, that was in time of war and involving specialised respirators proven to work against the putative threat. Meanwhile we're into week fifteen of a three week lockdown, so all things considered this case is more like demanding people in 1952 carry round an emergency ukulele at all times.

Well, either that or this.

Come to think of it, if we replaced all cars with unicycles that would probably save a few lives too. And you know the rule: If it saves one life....

And then there would be that other benefit too if we implemented Operation Unicycle. I can't help noticing that the Maskerbators will do anything to cut down on the risk from Wu Flu except the one thing actually proven to cut the risk.

Look at this tosser. 

Hey, Brains Trust, the only way the mask is going to keep you safe from the Kung Flu is if it stops you eating that garbage.

But no: you can tell what really motivates by what they do, not what they say. They'll virtue signal and they parade round in their regalia as members of the New Woke Order but actually swerving lunch or lifting some weights? That would take actual..... effort. I mean, it would also make them safer, but screw that.

Apparently, Covid 19 is a huge threat, but not one of those ones where you take any action to protect yourself from it.

That's my deal: I'll take these guys seriously if every time they preach the importance of making sacrifices to Hoodonia, the God of Masks, they drop and bang out twenty push ups.

Hey, I'm old enough to remember when we worried about totalitarian governments wanting to gag the press, not the entire country (but BTW, what are odds that there will be an exemption for media employees)?

Just to be sure though, the sight of the MSM pushing ludicrous regulations that they themselves will evade should in no way reduce your respect for the watchdog media.

That's the real point right there. As a wise man - me - once said: they hate you. The political establishment get off on  rubbing the public's nose in  it. They think it's hilarious to make previously free citizens shuffle into the store gagged like gimps and they'll think it's even funnier once they manage to victimise a few rebels.

Hey, at least it's better than their previous stunts, like protecting rape gangs or letting terrorists walk free, so there is that, but the basic impulse is all the same.

What can we do about it short term? Nothing much, except to ditch all this talk about 'bringing the country together'. There is no country any more and these people are not our fellow citizens in any meaningful sense because, again, they hate you and they want you to suffer. The least we can do is return the favour.

They Hate You

Tucker Carlson's show on Fox is now generating the highest ratings in cable news history. I can see why: look at this bit where he takes on the left's flex towards identity politics

Yep, that's the really key thing about it all. The left hasn't just down-played actual inequality in favour of loopy conspiracy theories - talking about 'white privilege' instead of actual privilege. The left has now actively turned against the people it used to represent, using identity politics to provide a wafer-thin level of plausible deniability.

That's true in Britain too. There's a reason why of all the white football managers in all of the world, race-hustling bum Raheem Sterling chose to slime Stephen Gerrard. He knew what the MSM wanted and that's why they were happy to run with a smear that could have been debunked with a five second google search (BTW, isn't being able to spread provably false racial atrocity stories without suffering any consequences whatsoever also a form of privilege)?

It works the other way too, hence why Home Counties rich kid turned filthy rich tax exile Lewis Hamilton is now a leftist icon. He's sticking it to the man - specifically, the tax man, but as long as he comes out with the right amount of inflammatory drivel about the proles in the cheap seats liberals will hail his heroism.

That's true at a corporate level too. There's an almost perfect relationship between how woke a corporation is and how sleazy its corporate affairs are. Back to football again: the football authorities are super woke, meanwhile the folks building the stadiums for the next World Cup are treated as all but slaves (I bet Raheem is going to get right on that).

The modern left is all about using bogus claims of racial inequality to justify doing absolutely nothing about  actual economic and social  inequality.

This Is Why Labour Can't Win Elections

If you had Theresa May in the 'Strange New Respect' sweepstake, collect your winnings: she's the latest Tory that the MSM has suddenly decided is a far-sighted visionary (now she's started attacking conservatives).

Personally, I'm pretty sure that pointing out that someone lacks the very special expertise of our foreign policy establishment may not be the killer point the usual suspects think it is. These are the people who turned Libya into a hell hole, tried to get us into Syria on the same side as ISIS and want to hand over our infrastructure to China. Basically, they're the Typhoid Mary of foreign policy. Not being in their little club sounds like a good thing to me.

Apparently, I'm not the only one, hence why BoJo got a huge majority - unlike certain people I could mention.

And all this is without considering the wider issues. Isn't the Labour Party's position pretty much the literal opposite of what their founders believed? Now the People's Party is claiming that, sure, you proles can go and vote for whoever you want, but the really important stuff needs to be left to our new aristocracy, like His Grace, Mark, Duke of Sedwill.

No one knows who these people are or how they got their jobs or even who they think they're accountable to. Apparently, paying a huge pile of cash plus a solid gold pension to civil servants, no matter how terrible they are at their job, is now a permanent feature of British life. Freedom of speech and equality under the law are disposable, but paying money to snoots is part of what makes us a civilised nation.

If the PM can't replace a useless civil servant, who can? Seriously, if we had any working journalists in this country they'd ask Starmer about this: just who can fire one of these guys? What would be a sacking offence?

Nope, Labour has supported all manner of PC witchunts against regular Joes, but the People's Party has  now thrown a ring of steel around the snoot class, yet somehow they keep losing elections. 

Access Media: 'Hate Speech? Never Heard Of It!'

Personally, I think 'hate speech' is a ludicrous concept - and, yes, some speech can encourage crazy people to do crazy things, but the operative word here is crazy! Some people think God is speaking to them via the weather forecast, that's not an argument for censoring the Met Office.

Still, you know who disagrees with all that? Raheem Sterling for one. He's convinced that every time some fat slob in Row XX shouts racist abuse at him it's both a cause and an effect of a deeper evil in British society. 

Yes, indeed, Fatso T Nobrain might never have been elected Dog Catcher, but all he needs to do is scream abuse at a grossly overpaid prat on the pitch and suddenly he's King Of All The White Men.

As it happens though, we've just had three white people stabbed to death in Reading just hours after St Raheem's friends at Black Lives Matter held one of their rallies. Coincidence? 

Well, hey, like I say, I'm a free speech maximalist so I'll defend the right of even obnoxious tools to spread stupid, racist conspiracy theories, but how about a bit of sauce for that goose? Any chance anyone from the MSM will ask St Raheem how all this meshes with his constant sermonising about the dangers of hate speech? If some guy shouting abuse at an overpaid celeb can provoke racist violence, how about thugs pushing deranged racist conspiracies? How about the aforementioned celeb using his media profile to push the same theories? Does that have any effect?

At all?

Nope, the same media cucks who hailed St Raheem's heroism - heroism in the sense of denouncing fat losers - have suddenly decided that hate speech doesn't exist after all.

It's Not About Slavery....

Things I never thought I'd say: someone made a really good point on Twitter the other day.

It was about all the race-hustling celebs preaching about muh slavery. Right now, the closest thing we have in the world to industrial-scale, institutionalised slavery is what happens in Chinese labour camps...

You know... that country where huge numbers of western companies have outsourced their production to. 

You know... the companies that sign huge sponsorship and merchandising deals with prominent sportsmen and celebs, like Raheem Sterling, Lewis Hamilton and John Boyega... 

Never mind the 'legacy of slavery' - people are profiting from slavery, right now.

Hey, they're outrageously outraged against slavery? How about turning down the cash? Sterling is on £150K per week at Man City - I think he'll get by on his salary alone. Take a stand, Raheem!

And then there's all the alleged 'journalists' in the Access Media who never quite bring this up... maybe Chairman Xi has a camp we can outsource the MSM to?

Grandma Got Run Over By A Bandwagon

Good news, everyone! The MSM has finally acknowledged that you can oppose national house arrest without necessarily wanting to kill Grandma!

Hey, I wonder what's changed? 

Call me a conspiracy nut but I can't help thinking there's something going on when thousands of violent lunatics are free to hold their brain-damaged version of a Nuremberg rally, even while the police clamp down on the real enemy.

Those guys should have claimed they were getting a short scissors cut to protest capitalism. As it is, working for a living is criminalised while violent nutters are free to do whatever. A guy could almost think the law depends on whether or not what you're doing helps the left push its demented agenda. .

But at least the MSM has finally found the true hero of the hour and he's both stunning and brave

He's risking his career, you guys. If there's one thing Hollyweird can't abide it's a guy spewing left wing talking points! They just won't stand for it.

Plus he's making a fearless stand against racism.... well, some racism anyway.

It's one for the philosophers alright  - if a guy's fine with black racism, and Chinese racism, but not white racism, isn't he just plain.... racist?

That's actually the key issue and it's not a small thing. The PC PCs at the Met inadvertently summed it up perfectly.

Yep, some guy get killed thousands of miles away and that's proof of the Grand Universal Theory of White Racism, meanwhile jihadists going on the rampage to try and kill as many Infidels as possible?

Just a 'tragic event'. One of those things you guys. No wider issues whatsoever.

As ever, Ace puts his finger on it:

Now, everytime there's an Islamic attack on US citizens, we're warned about anti-Islamic rhetoric, because that might lead to "backlash." Curiously, we're never cautioned about anti-American rhetoric which leads to Islamic attacks on US citizens, which you'd think would be the primary concern after a Muslim conducts a terrorist attack on US citizens.

Is the media cautioning the "protesters" calling for "pigs" to be slaughtered about the effect their rhetoric might have?

It means something when the same police who go in mob handed against a seventy year old white guy ignore a gang of thugs on the rampage. Specifically, it means we're being asked to accept that there are multiple grades of citizenship.

It says a lot about how useless the Tory Party is that none of its MPs seem alert to this ideological evil.

*Multiple* Layers Of Factchecking

Say, remember that story the MSM was obsessed with last week?

Yep, that one.

Well, it turns out....

The Mail on Sunday can today reveal that a retired teacher who reported the No 10 adviser to police broke lockdown rules himself – while a supposed ‘witness’ who claimed Mr Cummings had made a second trip to the region admitted he made his statement up as a joke. 

Tim Matthews said that he doctored the details on an app used by runners to record routes and times to make it seem like he had seen Mr Cummings in Durham six days after he had returned to London. 

Meanwhile, former teacher Robin Lees, who called police about Mr Cummings taking a trip from his parents’ Durham home to Barnard Castle, last night admitted to making a long-distance trip himself.

Say, would that be the retired teacher who claimed he had verified Cumming's identity by running his plates through a database that in reality is only accessible to police officers? Or would it be some other one?

I guess it wasn't about the lockdown after all. Who'd have thunk it?

Not the MSM anyway. They keep preaching about the dangers of the online world, even while they give publicity to obvious frauds. They're either really stupid or really corrupt, either way I think we'll get along fine without them. 

Since We're All Talking About Bad Trips....

If I understand the rules correctly, Laurence Fox can't talk about racial issues because he's not black, but everyone who's ever watched 'Rain Man' is qualified to claim that having an autistic child is no big deal, you guys!

Hey, I wouldn't normally mention it but since families are now in play - to the point of doorstepping people's elderly parents - when are the MSM ever going to ask any serious questions about this?

A few days later he beat up a doctor at Mile End Hospital, assaulted a female nurse at the Royal Free Hospital and hit out at another man. 

He went on in October to expose himself at Homerton Hospital. And on November 7, he racially abused a nurse, assaulted her and smashed her glasses. 

The next day he set upon another policeman. And on November 29 he assaulted two officers outside the Foreign Office, where he was employed until leaving that summer to do consultancy work.

Yes, indeed, the MSM all but implies that Cummings Junior is faking it, even while they act like an evil - possibly racist - pipe jumped Jimmy Boy one day, forced itself between his lips and drove him all the way over the rainbow.

Reminder - unless you're dependent on the MSM in which case you'll be hearing this for the first time - this guy was on the fastest of fast track schemes in the Remoaner's favorite government department. Nobody foisted him on them, they were the ones who choose him to join their alleged elite. He was their New European Man, a snoot Samurai, a proud member of Leibstandarte Mark Sedwill...

All of which is by way of saying that when Remoaners claim we're too stoopid to know what we're voting for, they mean leave it to guys like this.

Say, how did a guy who consumes more drugs than Great Ormond Street somehow end up getting selected for an elite role anyway? Surely a world-famous campaigner for equality like Diane Abbott must be keen to ensure lessons are learned, right?

And then there's the flip side of that. Fat Diane is all about the brothers and sisters in the Hood keepin' it real, yo!... meanwhile Junior slides effortlessly into a job with the snootiest of snoot departments. How's that for actin' white? 

If you want to know why the Labour Party is evil, consider the contrast between how they feel about a race-hustling fraud like Diane X and someone who encourages actual achievement like Kathy Birbalsingh.

Remoaners: Not Getting It Since 2016

House of Dumb Rule One: Liberals always - always - overdo it.

Take the Dominic Cummings situation. The left and the MSM - but I repeat myself - claim he should be sacked because he may possibly has broken the law to ensure he safety of his mentally handicapped four year old son.

That's an attack line with 'win' all over it: dad was excessively concerned with junior's safety.

Does anyone outside the bubble find this remotely compelling? But no: the usual suspects are piling in and by doing so, they're pretty much reminding us why people voted conservative in the first place. Consider this: Sky News featured a lovely chat about all this between Adam Boulton and Alistair Campbell.

Seriously.

Can you think of two better representatives of what the public rejected in December than these two disgusting, arrogant pigs? The whole reason Boris Johnson got elected was because he won the votes of everyone who refused to accept the presence of scumbags like this in public life as a permanent feature of British politics. The MSM isn't worried about the specifics of Cumming's road trip, they're worried that he might threaten their ability to treat public life as a member's only club. 

Quote of the Day: Modern Politics Edition

Ace of Spades blog nails it.

And then there are the Church Ladies of our new state religion - the whole Karen meme is about these suddenly empowered secular Church Ladies who live for moments like this. Normally their only joy in life is scolding people for simple sins such as not using canvas grocery bags or perhaps driving a large SUV. Now these humorless vigilantes feel they are deputized to enforce the observance of the shutter-at-home sabbath. A sabbath that goes on day after day, week after week, without any end in sight. Karen could not be happier. It is a near certainty that lockdown-induced chastity being imposed on millions of people is a thought that warms the icy heart of these charmless people. (And yes, there are male Church Ladies. We most commonly refer to them as “journalists")

On which subject, Norfolk Police clearly know who the real enemy are: people in unapproved fancy dress.

Isn't that just special? Inspector Karen wants to 'provide words of advice about the implications of his actions'. 

I guess the whole Tori Kutz thing is over now, huh?

And that's not the worst of it. There's a case for this authoritarian lunacy, just like there are good arguments against it, but the whole thing with Karenism, the most defining feature of it, is that it's the political equivalent of looking the wrong way down the telescope. Inspector Karen and the rest of the Operation Versace team are ready to Go! Go! Go! just as soon as they get a fix on this Unlicensed Thespian, but how about the stuff the Government is meant to control? The absolutely basic, pretty much the definition of being a country, stuff, like controlling our borders?

Nope, forget that. They're perfectly happy for .gov.uk to do absolutely nothing then take cover behind crappy euphemisms like 'so connected to the rest of the world'. 

Yep, that's it. It's just like how George Best died because he was so connected to the brewing industry.

Annnnnnnnd that's how we ended up in a country where the Wuhan Clan can jet right in 24-7, but if you want to sit on the grass in the park you, sir, are worse than Typhoid Mary.

The Sliding Sombrero

It's now Day 472 of the lockdown - well, it feels like that - and we still have to put up with people virtue signalling about their readiness to deprive cancer patients of treatment. Hey, morons: this.

If you want to keep people from potentially life-saving treatment to protect yourself against a purely theoretical 0.001% increased chance of death, yes, you are the bad guy.

Meanwhile, normal people are starting to disregard the lockdown. 

Yep, that's a mystery, alright - unless you're one of those weirdoes with an actual, y'know, memory.

For those of us who can remember stuff before last week, the lockdown was meant to slow down the spread of the virus to prevent the hospitals being swamped. Like pretty much any outbreak in history, the idea was that those affected would fall into one of three groups. Some people would get better on their own, some would die no matter what treatment they were given - which is terrible for the people concerned but also, by definition, inevitable - and some would survive with the right treatment. The lockdown, by slowing down the rate of infection, was meant to ensure no one in the third group died through lack of treatment.

Hence, all the talk of flattening the curve.

That's exactly what happened. The lockdown was a rare case of a successful government program but it's somehow become a not rare at all case of a government program that's taken on a life of its own. Nurses are making tik tok videos but we're still locked down. We can't go back to work until.....

Nope, no idea. We're just meant to accept perma-lockdown as one more thing that all upstanding citizens are meant to support simply by definition. Anyone who questions it wants to kill grandma.

There's No There There

Over in the sidebar at Ace of Spades blog, there's a really good question:

Interesting: The same people who say we have to shut down the country based on nothing but guesses and "models" are the exact same people saying we must not prescribe hydroxychloroquine until we have full 10,000 participant double-blind trials and conclusive scientific proof.

It seems the alleged "Science-Lovers" and Twitter scolds are willing to roll the dice on some speculations, but are extremely aggressive that we don't gamble on other ones.

So strange that sometimes we take suggestive evidence as conclusive proof that we must do something dramatic and destructive -- shutting the country's economy down -- but in other case, suggestive evidence is not enough to encourage doctors to prescribe a well-tested drug with minimal side-effects.

Why?

Well, quite.

Hydroxychloroquine has been used prophylactically for decades to prevent malaria. If it caused people's heads to explode, someone would have noticed by now. In fact, it may well be the least-new new drug in history, but we're all supposed to believe that prescribing it in this specific case, and only this case, is somehow incredibly dangerous. Hey, maybe we ought to tell the pills they're been taken to fight malaria, and hope they won't know the difference.

As the great Ann Coulter points out, things were a little different with an earlier plague:

When it came to AIDS, the gay community’s successful campaign to compel the FDA to allow “compassionate” use of unapproved drugs was a civil rights milestone on the order of Selma.

In a 1990 editorial, for example, The New York Times praised the “educated and articulate” gay spokesmen for bringing about “changes in the traditional methods of testing drugs,” adding that the new procedures were “a compassionate response to AIDS sufferers.”

Meanwhile, the MSM is occupying its time with stupid have you stopped beating your wife questions and bogus atrocity stories about the lack of ventilators... no, wait. That was last week, it's PPE that's the scandal this week.

It's all outrage, all the time, but no one will ask why doctors across the world have suddenly succumbed to the exact same delusion about patients getting better when they're prescribed a specific type of drug therapy.

What do the MSM think is going on? Mass hysteria?

Nope, they don't think at all. Bias doesn't even cover it. For all their ostentatious globalism, the MSM are the most insular people on the planet, particularly in the UK. Even a pandemic is viewed in terms of how it affects things in a half dozen north London postcodes.

You can hardly get them to acknowledge that closing down the economy may have negative side effects. 

All of which is by way of saying I can well understand this. How much respect are we meant to have for a bunch of clowns who offer no actual insight whatsoever, just a continuous bunch of lame-o gotchas?

They're supposed to be the Smartest People In The Room but all they can offer is parochial talking points. If it's actual analysis you're after, you're better off with just a bloggers like Hector Drummond.

It goes a little deeper as well. As US Youtuber Stephen Crowder points out, with the shut down in place America's late night talk show hosts are now just particularly high-profile Youtubers...

High profile *bad* Youtubers.

It turns out that once you take away the football team size writers room and the slick production values you're left with the entertainment equivalent of a bunch of beached whales.

Yep, the smart set aren't smart, and the funny guys aren't funny, but at least their arrogance is intact!