Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

The Corona Virus Syndrome Q&A

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What is the Corona Virus Syndrome
Feelings of trust or affection felt in many cases by those who have been forced into a lockdown by these victim towards those who have enforced the lockdown

Corona Virus syndrome is a psychological response which occurs when individuals who are forced into lockdown situations bond with those who have enforced self-isolation and quarantine. This psychological connection develops over the course of the days, weeks, months, or even years of being locked down and being deprived of freedom and rights.

Corona Virus Syndrome is a coping strategy which individuals who are put into lockdown may develop. Fear or terror of developing some disease that is empirically almost certain not to harm them might be most common in these situations, but some individuals begin to develop positive feelings toward those have introduced and have been enforcing the lockdown.

Is the Corona Virus Syndrome a form of brainwashing?
The idea of brainwashing not being a new concept does have many similarities. The reactions of those in lockdown may be described as the result of being brainwashed by their captors.

Is ‘political trauma bonding’ the same as the Corona Virus Syndrome?
The term ‘political trauma bond’ is one of the major forms of the Corona Virus Syndrome. It describes a deep bond which forms between the victims of a lockdown and their political abusers. Victims of such abuse often develop a strong sense of loyalty towards their political abuser, despite the fact that the bond is damaging to themselves emotionally and economically.

What does political trauma bonding mean?
A simple and more encompassing definition is that political traumatic bonding is: “a strong emotional attachment between an abused person in a lockdown situation and his or her political abuser.”

What does political trauma bonding feel like?
‘Political trauma bonding’ refers to a state of being emotionally attached not to a kind friend or family member, but to a political leader who puts individuals into lockdown by asserting that such a lockdown will provide longer-term benefits in spite of the short-term harm to their lives.

Can Corona Virus Syndrome be cured?
Since a person may have experienced mental, emotional and physical abuse during the period of a lockdown, it may take years for the victim to see improvement.

How do you break the cycle of political trauma bonding?

     10 Ways to break ‘political traumatic bonding’:

  1. Recognise that political leaders have agendas of their own that have nothing to do with your welfare.
  2. Stop being terrified about politicised issues whose dangers seem highly exaggerated.
  3. Start reality training both about such politicised issues and about the political leaders who promote them.
  4. Ask good questions and make certain the answers are consistent with the actions being taken. Remember the first priority for political leaders is personal power not your welfare.
  5. Do some personal research, and especially among those authorities who take a different position from the positions being taken by political leaders.
  6. Do everything you can to end lockdowns as soon as possible.
  7. Get out of the house, discuss what is being done with others and start socialising.
  8. Put your focus on common sense.
  9. Learn to read and interpret statistics.
  10. Identify political hypocrisy wherever you find it.

Are there any other similar syndromes?
There are a number of other such syndromes. These include the Global Warming Syndrome and the Socialist Central Planning Syndrome.

Disbanding the police is all the rage

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Impossible you say. Start here: Going All-In: Minneapolis City Council Considers Disbanding Entire Police Force…. Insane, right?

This “community policing” process is already taking place in many European communities the results create what are known as “no go zones.” Neighborhoods, and entire parts of cities, where local Sharia compliance enforcement officers have replaced the police force; and the rules, regulations and enforcement are detached from the larger social compact. Considering that Minneapolis has a large concentration of Somali Muslims within the local population, it makes sense this approach is now discussed for their city.

Minneapolis – […] Now the council members are listening to a city that is wounded, angry, fed up with decades of violence disproportionately visited upon black and brown residents. Various private and public bodies – from First Avenue to Minneapolis Public Schools – have essentially cut ties with the police department. Council members are trying to figure out what their next move is.

Their discussion is starting to sound a little more like what groups like Reclaim the Block and the Black Visions Collective have been saying for years. On Tuesday, Fletcher published a lengthy Twitter thread saying the police department was “irredeemably beyond reform,” and a “protection racket” that slows down responses as political payback.

“Several of us on the council are working on finding out what it would take to disband the Minneapolis Police Department and start fresh with a community-oriented, nonviolent public safety and outreach capacity,” he wrote. (read more)

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, the man now in charge of the prosecution of Derek Chauvin and the Minneapolis police officers involved in George Floyd’s death, is a very well known Muslim activist and supporter of the sharia doctrine.

And then this: Australia: Muslim leader says riots an “opportunity” for Muslims to seize global leadership and impose Sharia.

Australia: Muslim leader says riots an “opportunity” for Muslims to seize global leadership and impose Sharia

Meanwhile, non-Muslim leaders in the West demand that we all accept that no Muslims, no, not one, want to impose Sharia in Western countries, and declare that anyone who thinks otherwise is a greasy Islamophobe, a “fearmonger.”

“‘We will take over’: Australian leader of extremist Islamic group says US riots are an ‘opportunity’ for Muslims to seize global leadership and impose Sharia law,” by Stephen Johnson, Daily Mail Australia, June 3, 2020:

A controversial Muslim preacher is predicting Islam will replace the United States as the world’s dominant geopolitical force.

Ismail al-Wahwah, the Australian spiritual leader of hardline Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, has suggested riots across the US would bring down the global superpower.

‘Who will take over if America fall?,’ he said a video on Wednesday night.

‘Someone can say Europe, someone can say China, speak about Russia some, but for me the message is, the one who have more values, true values, and that’s us Muslims.

‘I would be hypocrite if I say I’m not happy for what’s happening in America today.’

Mr al-Wahwah described the violent mass demonstrations across the US as an opportunity for Muslims to exploit – following the alleged murder of black man George Floyd in Minneapolis by a white police officer.

‘It’s time to use this opportunity to stand up, and to come back and to take the leadership again,’ Mr al-Wahwah said.

‘We as a Muslim, we should take this opportunity to take the leadership again, I know it’s not easy job.

‘I know it will cost us much, but I know 100 per cent that we are able, we can do it.’

Hizb ut-Tahrir is global Islamist political party, active in 50 countries, that wants Islam imposed as a political system.

It has a goal of replacing world governments with a caliphate based on the rule of Sharia law.

The Islamist group’s ‘Draft Constitution of the Khilafa State’, a blueprint for how its caliphate would govern, advocates the killing of ex-Muslims, known as ‘apostates’.

Despite its fundamentalist Islamic ideology that endorses slavery and only allows Muslim men to rule, Hizb ut-Tahrir is claiming to be the party of civil rights and is convinced riots against police brutality would hasten the downfall of the US.

Ismail al-Wahwah, the Australian spiritual leader of Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, has suggested riots across the US would bring down the global superpower

‘Do you think what’s happening in America will be the end of the Americans’ time? Yes,’ Mr al-Wahwah said….

You just wander around with your head in the clouds but there are lots of people out there with lots of plans that do not sound so impossible if you see what they are up to. Human rights. Free speech. Freedom of religion. All so last century.

Camus’ The Plague

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Not a single person I once was friends with back in Canada has changed their political position in all the years since I’ve known them, not a single one, and I’ve known them all for more than fifty years. It really is weird. Most I am happy to see when I go home but we seldom discuss politics; some I can still talk politics with but it is always through gritted teeth (theirs) and I never bring politics up. Some I do not bother seeing when I am there and why I avoid them is always for political reasons. And not one of them I see more frequently than once every two years since I hardly ever get back. As I say, weird. Yet why dealing with the coronavirus is a political issue is hard to explain, but it is. The virus will never disappear, it will always mutate, and I do not expect us to stay in lockdown forever. And while perhaps I should be, I am not frightened by it even though I am in the high-danger zone according to age and “co-morbidities” and it may get me yet.

Just finished Albert Camus’ The Plague. It was written in the 1940s as a political allegory about radical political views being akin to a virus. Today it reads just like a story about a plague-ridden population put into lockdown. The political allegory is near invisible. The horrors of an epidemic are made very clear.

The point of the story is to use the virus as a metaphor for totalitarian political repression. The irony today is that actual existing political leaders have used the spectre of a virus as a means to repress populations all around the world by arguing they have done so to protect them.

As for The Plague, it is only a story:

Oran was decimated by the bubonic plague in 1556 and 1678, but all later outbreaks (in 1921 – 185 cases, 1931 – 76 cases, and 1944 – 95 cases) were very far from the scale of the epidemic described in the novel.

Brilliantly written and well worth reading, especially now.

Lost and gone forever

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Clementine Ford

Oh my darling, oh my darling
Oh my darling, Clementine
You are lost and gone forever

Not sure if there are any souls more wayward than those who have been caught up in the latest intellectual fad that disappears into the mists of time even while they live. Which brings me to this from Andrew Bolt: CLEMENTINE FORD AND THE BETRAYAL OF FEMINISM.

Clementine Ford is called “Australia’s most prominent contemporary feminist”. What stunning proof that feminism has betrayed itself.

This movement once demanded women receive equal treatment. Now it demands women receive special protection, as if they’re as fragile as sexists always claimed.

Take Ford. She’s the kind of feminist who’s tweeted “kill all men”, and on Saturday complained that “coronavirus isn’t killing men fast enough”.

This brand of feminism now attracts official support. Ford last year got a gig on the ABC, and Melbourne City Council this month gave her a grant to write another book.

But check out the double standards.

Last year, Ford joined another public lynching by the Left of Alan Jones, after he said he was sick of the global warming idiocy of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and wanted a sock stuffed “down her throat”. This was too much for the suddenly delicate sensibilities of Ford, who said she deplored such “verbal assaults” which were “sexist” and an affront to “human dignity”

So let me say it right here: there is no greater possibility for contentment and life satisfaction than from a happy marriage, especially if it is blessed with children. There are no longer any rules that inhibit women from achieving whatever they are capable of. But there are many traps for the unwary that will derail many from finding where their true happiness will lie. It is so unfashionable to say this, but this is for almost everyone – male of female – the absolute truth.

Remember the rule: only pay heed to those who you agree with

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I got the rule from my friend Peter Smith. Everyone follows that rule, unconsciously or not. For us conservatives, it means that anyone who seems to side with the left on key issues can no longer be trusted in discussing other issues.

For those of us on the right, the rule does not mean that we never get to hear what the left believes and what its latest delusions are. Not only do we know what these beliefs are, it’s essential to understand pretty well all of what they believe if for no other reason than just as a means to protect ourselves from whatever forms of madness is their latest fad belief.

For the left, that is all they know and are never allowed to hear what their critics say. Living in a world populated by conservatives seldom harms the lives of anyone on the left. In fact, it is all that protects them from their own idiocies and beliefs. Living in a world as they conjure it would plunge them, along with everyone else, into deep pockets of misery and destitution, as has happened often enough.

Here is the basic truth: everyone is conservatives about things they know something about, especially about things which will affect their lives and livelihoods. It is actual personal knowledge about some subject that makes one a conservative, but for those without a conservative disposition, only about that particular subject, tending to limit wild flights of unrealistic conjecturing about things they know from personal experience. I think this quote expresses the same sentiment quite well:

Like Aristotle, conservatives generally accept the world as it is; they distrust the politics of abstract reason – that is, reason divorced from experience.

And more fully, there is a quote from John Stuart Mill that was first stated during a Parliamentary debate in 1866, which given the re-branding of various political inclinations in today’s world, is now best stated in this way:

I did not mean that people on the left are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally on the left.

Anyone who genuinely tries to think about the problems of society and how to solve them cannot base their solutions on more than a handful of people ever acting other than in their own interests, with the subtext being that people acting in their own interests are not likely, when acting in a social setting, to lead a community into chaos and ruin, political leaders aside. They may wish to do good but all to often do not. But even without doing good being their intention, they usually cannot go too far because in the end everyone else will stop. Or at least they usually will, but unfortunately not always.

People on the left never disagree with each other

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As near as I can tell, people on the left never disagree with each other. They certainly disagree with people on the right, but other than in relation to to all the things they all agree about amongst themselves, where are the internal debates so that you can find examples of one person on the left saying something that another person, still on the left, disagrees with, and yet both remain on the same side of politics.

On the left there is a single acceptable position and after that, no deviation is permitted. That they believe themselves to be critical thinkers is only because they all collectively disagree with people who disagree with any element of the common set of beliefs.

One does not have to be on the left to believe that climate change is a problem. Or that gay marriage should be legal. Or that many aspects of the market economy are unacceptable. Or that Donald Trump is not a nice person. On the right, all these are open for debate. On the left, they are fixed positions, in no sense open for discussion.

This is a depiction of conservatism as I see it, written by Irving Kristol. Titled The right stuff, it explains the difference between the conservative perspective in the US and in the UK. Being from the New World myself, and Australians fit into this pattern as well, I find myself siding here with Kristol.

Conservatism in the US today is a movement, a popular movement, not a faction within any political party. Although most conservatives vote Republican, they are not party loyalists and the party has to woo them to win their votes. The movement is issue-oriented. It will happily combine with the Republicans if the party is “right” on the issues. If not, it will walk away. This troubled relationship between the conservative movement and the Republicans is a key to the understanding of American politics today. The conservative movement is a powerful force within the party, but it does not dominate. And there is no possibility of the party ever dominating the movement.

American conservatism after the second world war begins to take shape with the American publication of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in 1943 and the founding in 1955 of William F Buckley’s National Review. Previously, there had been a small circle who were admirers of the Jeffersonian, quasi-anarchist, teaching of the likes of Albert Jay Nock, but no one paid much attention to them. Hayek’s polemic against socialism did strike a chord, however, especially among members of the business community. There may have been people converted from statism to anti-statism by that book, but my impression is that most admirers of the book were already pro-free market. What Hayek did was to mobilise them intellectually, and to make their views more respectable.

I will take you to the final para which seems more relevant today than when it was first written in 1996.

The US today shares all of the evils, all of the problems, to be found among the western democracies, sometimes in an exaggerated form. But it is also the only western democracy that is witnessing a serious conservative revival that is an active response to these evils and problems. The fact that it is a populist conservatism dismays the conservative elites of Britain and western Europe, who prefer a more orderly and dignified kind of conservatism. It is true that populism can be a danger to our democratic orders. But it is also true that populism can be a corrective to the defects of democratic order, defects often arising from the intellectual influence and the entrepreneurial politics, of our democratic elites. Classical political thought was wary of democracy because it saw the people as fickle, envious and inherently turbulent. They had no knowledge of democracies where the people were conservative and the educated elites that governed them were ideological, always busy provoking disorder and discontent in the name of some utopian goal. Populist conservatism is a distinctly modern phenomenon, and conservative thinking has not yet caught up with it. That is why the “exceptional” kind of conservative politics we are now witnessing in the US is so important. It could turn out to represent the “last, best hope” of contemporary conservatism.

Whether it is the best hope or not is uncertain, but that it may be the last hope is looking all to possible all the time.

“I Told You So, You F’n Fools”

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I had a friend, as far to the left as they come, who was thrilled to see the Soviet Union fall in 1991 since there would no longer be the bad example of socialism in action to deter others from joining the cause. We manage now to dissuade people from joining the Nazi Party, although we do not seem to be able to warn anyone about the dangers of any authoritarian system which are always of the left, no matter what name we given them. After all, Nazi means National Socialist in German. What has brought all this to mind is this: Inhuman power of the lie: “The Great Terror” at 40. It’s now been around 90 years since the start of the Great Terror itself; the 40 years only refers to the date of the publication of Conquest’s book in 1968 while the commemorative article was written in 2008. The story itself never grows old although fewer and fewer see its relevance.

The Great Terror refers to the purges that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. To give this more statistical accuracy, between 1937 and 1938, about seven million Russians were arrested, one million executed, and two million more or less murdered by the inhuman conditions of the Gulag. Throughout the entire period—roughly 1934 to 1939—there were not fewer than 15 million victims, overall. These are conservative estimates, and it’s worth bearing in mind that this abattoir system was invented, operated, and maintained “in detail” from the top, as against revisionist claims that Stalin and his cadre were unaware of the death count of their gruesome mechanism of state repression.

The article is really about Robert Conquest whose books should be read by anyone who wants to understand why every obstacle to political power is essential if you want to preserve your freedom, your prosperity, and ultimately in far too many cases, your life.

This anecdote yields quite a lot, I think, about more than Conquest’s winning personality (Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin: “Bob just goes on as if nothing has happened”). It also speaks ably of what has made him, apart from his groundbreaking research, such a powerful historian: irony and a wry sense of humor have offset some of the most tragic passages committed to print in the last hundred years. (“The sequence Lenin-Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev was like a chart illustrating the evolution of the hominids, read backward.”) As Amis plausibly, but inventively, tells it, when the publisher of The Great Terror asked Conquest what he’d like to re-title the book in its second edition, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and new archival material from Moscow vindicated almost all of its key judgments: “Well, perhaps, I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. How’s that?”

I hope you will forgive the title.

It’s just like politics

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It’s actually just like everything where someone can come in second. This is about Michael Jordan. And this is what Jordan said, and while you read it, think about all those people who oppose the American President because he’s not a nice man:

“Winning has a price. And leadership has a price. So I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn’t want to be challenged. And I earned that right because my teammates came after me.

“They didn’t endure all the things that I endured. Once you join the team, you live at a certain standard that I play the game, and I wasn’t going to take anything less. Now, if that means I have to go out there and get in your ass a little bit, then I did that. You ask all my teammates, the one thing about Michael Jordan was, he never asked me to do something that he didn’t f..kin’ do.”

He pauses as if he could not continue, and then he does: “When people see this, they’re going to say, ‘Well, he wasn’t really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant’. Well, that’s you. Because you never won anything. I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win and be a part of that as well … That’s how I played the game.

“That was my mentality. If you don’t want to play that, don’t play that way.”

Not just basketball, but everything is that way. Politics especially. Anyone who makes it to the top anywhere – even Miss Congeniality – has a ruthless streak that firstly seeks to learn the rules of the game and then to dominate and win. Most of us cannot do this ourselves and for our values to dominate leaders who can in-fight on our behalf are essential.

Go back to work and not incidentally preserve our freedom

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This is my agenda which I just mailed off to a colleague.

If I might say so, dealing with the logic of the lockdown will not save us from this massive assault on our freedoms. The theory is plain enough. If there is an epidemic in which each person individually can pass on the disease to someone else by our proximity to each other, then to limit the reach of the disease, one must limit proximity. If there is more to it than that, I have not noticed. Beyond that basic premise, there were from the start an incredible flow of statistical projections that have turned out not just to be wrong, but overwrought. Every one of these projections has been abandoned. I wish I could say that therefore the rule of “the expert” is now at an end. It actually looks like it is only now just getting into full swing. This, in my view, is a large part of what should concern us.

If you want an economics analogy, we saw the same rule of expertise after the Global Financial Crisis. The supposed economic pandemic disappeared within half a year, but the destructive long-term effects of the various stimulus packages have continued to weigh our economies down to this day.

The problem is, if I may say so, rule by public servants who never have any accountability applied to any errors they make. There is much more that could be said on that, but will just leave it at that. There seems to be no means to unwind what has been set in motion, especially since this has been so monstrously politicised. And with every political leader there has been an associated political agenda, not one of which has done a single bit of good.

Yet we have our own agenda, and this may be the time we bring this agenda into the national conversation. Our agenda is that we should decentralise decision making, allow individual initiative to lead in the search for solutions and medical cures, remove the restraints placed on the economy by the various policies to enforce “social distancing”, and we should open up the market place and allow everyone to get back to work, or to do whatever else they might choose to do. In the meantime, isolate those who are most at risk, and apply certain precautions especially on air travel.

The downside may be some additional deaths and a slightly longer duration of the corona virus within the population, although herd immunity will this way kick in sooner. But my near certainty is that the CV is now past the peak of its virulence. States that open up will not appear any worse off than those that do not. But we should be using this moment to emphasise the elements of our political, economic and social systems for what they are, the greatest protection that each and every person has. We should state clearly that the approach that has been adopted is a losers’ strategy which has no obvious end in sight, and we should be seeking a free and open society, in which everyone understands the risks that are inevitably there, and in which everyone does what they can to secure their own safety. We should make it clear that the government cannot protect you.

The government should obviously remain active in gathering and providing information on how each of us individually needs to act to limit the risks we face. By arguing against a lockdown and in favour of a freedom-based approach would not only be the best solution to the problem of the spread of the corona virus, but would also be in keeping with our own philosophies.

This seems to be similar to the approach suggested by Conrad Black: A Farrago of Democrat Delusions Will Bury Them in 2020.

In a month, Trump had invoked the National Emergencies and War Production Acts to get instant testing, now being conducted 300,000 times a day, and had General Motors and others manufacturing pulmonary ventilator machines. He “flattened the curve,” produced a formidable financial assistance plan for the shut-down country, and now urges everyone to work and school, as we now know that for the eighty percent of people beneath the age of 60 without compromised immune systems, the fatality rate is one for every 22,000 people.

Here is the contrast:

This is the Democrats’ plan: pretend Trump was responsible for the pitiful state of crisis medical response that he inherited, and that he didn’t act promptly in reducing the flow of incoming people from coronavirus-afflicted countries; pretend that he didn’t build an entire emergency medical service in three weeks; pretend that scores of millions of people should remain idle for months for the sake of a statistically very small number of potential deaths among the 260 million healthy Americans beneath the age of 60; pretend that it is Trump’s duty to impoverish a third of his countrymen as he sacrifices himself politically; and pretend that the revelation of unprecedented skulduggery by the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign in 2016 in corrupting the FBI and intelligence agencies and using them to try to influence and then undo a presidential election is just a red herring designed to distract the country.

We need to not just open our economies, we need to return to an open society as soon as we possibly can.