Come back moth and rust – all is forgiven

Toby Young, writing in the Daily Sceptic yesterday, revealed how the Paypal accounts of the Sceptic itself, Young’s Free Speech Union with around 9,000 members, and even his personal, seldom used account, have been closed without. An e-mail in my inbox this morning shows that the same has happened to UsForThem, an organisation set up to campaign on behalf of children, particularly as victims of misguided COVID policies.

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Disinformation

Isn’t it funny how words nowadays rapidly come to have a specialist meaning entirely divorced from their origin? For example, “far-right” is now very seldom used for actual fascists or Neo-nazis. Our press does not use it for the Ukrainian Krakens, the out-and-out Nazis who advertised in advance that they were going to hunt down “collaborators” and who are now showing pictures of the mutilated bodies of civilian victims of “Russian War Crimes” in the villages they have “liberated,” just like they did when they regained the village of Bucha months ago. “Far right” now means “having family values and telling the truth,” so it really ought to be embraced by all of us, as in “My plumber is as honest as they come – he’s a far right sort of chap,” or “Not only is she good looking, but she’s far right.” Kind of like “far out, but morally sound.”

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Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology | 2 Comments

But how do you know?

In my now highly-dated e-book Seeing Through Smoke I wrote about how, once propaganda becomes the basis of a society, even the most sceptical will be fooled much of the time:

In a society like the late Soviet Union, it may have been the case that everyone knew fifty percent of what they read in Pravda (ironically meaning “truth”!) to be false. But in a totalitarian state there was no independent way for them to know which fifty percent they should discount. I have no doubt that canny Russian dissidents who rightly rejected news reports on one issue were hoodwinked into believing other falsehoods, or indeed were dismissive of propaganda that turned out, in the event, to be perfectly true. Even dissidents may disagree.

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Is no theory as misleading as the wrong theory?

In an address I heard by the head of a theological college recently, he spoke of how people have come to believe in conspiracy theories, citing three: the existence of lizard people, the existence of a deep state, and the belief that SARS-CoV2 does not exist.

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Bias to the people

There are many examples of the way that the modern cult of “victimhood” produces evils in today’s society. One very current instance is the trend, newly arrived in the UK from America, for black mobs to to rampage through shopping centres inspired by some idea that looting is OK if you’re in an oppressed minority group. A second is the inability of the State to deal with male gangsters with guns, newly arrived in the UK from Albania in small boats, on the basis that there is no such thing as an illegal immigrant. A third is the abject apology of the Pope for the murder and mass-graves of First Nation Canadian children in Catholic schools, for which there is not only no real evidence, but also no attempt to find it, under some vague notion that actually digging up the alleged bodies would be disrespectful to ancient traditions… whereas a witch-hunt of innocent Catholics is not. Oh, we must not forget the demonisation of women who do not want to be impregnated in prisons by “trans women with a penis,” and many other such examples.

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Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 12 Comments

Evil, King Arthur and Oliver’s army

The Scottish archaeology and history presenter Neil Oliver got “red-pilled,” largely it appears through dialogues with Mike Graham on Talk Radio during COVID. There is, as we know, no going back once one sees behind the curtain, so in his own cliche (always amusing to my wife and me) the process has “changed Neil Oliverr forr everr.”

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Psychology of terminal diagnosis of a civilization

The unusual (and more or less simultaneous) outbreaks of violence at both the recent Notting Hill Carnival and the Reading Festival made me wonder if there is some particular sociological significance to it. This is especially so since other episodes of street violence and looting, including one in Oxford Street, have occurred in recent weeks, although they were little reported.

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The triumph of teleology

I promised I’d say something about Michael Denton’s The Miracle of Man, the premise of which is the extraordinary fine tuning of the universe itself not only for life, but for the existence of warm blooded, bipedal, oxygen-breathing mankind as the only plausible kind of intelligent and technological biological life-form in the universe.

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Posted in Creation, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | 2 Comments

Ask not what your country can do for you…

Since the 2008 crash ordinary people in this country have seen a steady, and now a sudden drop, in real economic prosperity. It began as extra taxation was laid on them so that they might save the banks, which (if Black Rock is anything to go by) have now gone on to take over the world by the same scams that led to the crash in the first place.

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The old, old story

I’m currently reading Michael Denton’s new book, The Miracle of Man, which explores some of the astonishing fine tuning of the Universe not only for life, but for human life. I must do a blog on it soon, but my first reaction was a sense of resentment at how the insane deception now surrounding us on every side has drawn me from a decade of study of such wonders of nature (and hence of God) to filling these pages with stuff categorised as “politics and sociology”.

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Posted in Creation, History, Philosophy, Theology | 2 Comments