We’re in the midst of a pandemic endangering our civilisation. No, I don’t mean Covid, which by comparison only qualifies as a minor annoyance.
Covid mainly attacks the lungs, but the pandemic I’m talking about affects the brain. We are, I believe, in the midst of a cerebral catastrophe, and no vaccine is being developed.
The aetiology goes back to the Enlightenment, and the clinical picture includes multiple symptoms. But the most telling one is rapacious mass appetite for swallowing any rubbish on offer.
Brainwashed in the evils of discrimination, our comprehensively educated public can no longer discriminate between truth and falsehoods. It even seems to be unaware that a difference exists.
Examples supporting this observation are too numerous to bring together in a short piece. So I’ll just pick a couple off the top, choosing the most current.
Earlier this month we had scorching temperatures, way above average. Consequently, not a single weather report either in print or broadcast failed to mention global warming, climate change or words to that effect.
The difference between weather and climate is lost on most people, which is understandable. After all, unseasonably hot weather may well be a sign of some global trend.
Fair enough. I’ll go along, even though I’ve read a few books on the subject and therefore know that there’s infinitely more to it than meets the eye. But I recognise that not everyone is prepared to read long tomes full of arcane science, graphs and charts.
So fine, hot weather is an argument for global warming. However, by the same token unseasonably cold weather should be an argument against it, shouldn’t it? However, this elementary logical inference escapes most people – that’s the pandemic for you.
As I left the house at 9 o’clock this morning, the temperature was 12 degrees Celsius (54 F). That’s unusually cold for late August, and it has been like this for a week or so.
Yet not a single weather report I’ve seen, nor a single commentator on such matters, has rued that there goes global warming, right out of the window. That would be a poor argument con, but no poorer than a reference to hot weather as an argument pro.
Of course, most of our media are ideologically committed to the global warming scam. They get paid good money for scaremongering, and I find it hard to blame them. God knows I’ve advertised some dodgy products for money.
Yet the people at large, those who have no vested or pecuniary interest in the hoax, don’t mind gobbling up this rancid fare. Their mental olfactory sense has been lost to the pandemic.
That’s why grown-ups with university degrees and responsible positions in the academy, governments, charities and arts cheer when a conspicuously backward child, Greta Thunberg, harangues them and demands action in response to her diatribes.
She’s doing a Violet Elizabeth Bott, who threatened to “thcweam and thcweam until I’m thick”, which is what children do. Yet the adult protagonists in Just William books neither succumbed to Violet Elizabeth’s threats nor applauded her tantrums.
But the non-fictional adults I’ve mentioned venerate Greta for demanding that all carbon emissions be eliminated instantly, a measure that would just as instantly result in famines killing millions of people.
True enough, today’s professional humanists don’t mind turning large swathes of the world into today’s answer to Maidanek and Magadan just to make an ideological point. That, however, only makes them evil, not necessarily stupid.
But what about millions nodding their acquiescent heads whenever that child from hell froths at the mouth all the way into the eagerly awaiting arms of the Nobel Committee, whose embrace she only narrowly missed this year? They’ve fallen victim to the pandemic in question.
Then there’s the news of JK Rowling jumping before she was pushed. The writer has returned her human-rights award to the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation that denounced her for transphobia.
For those of you not up on the woke lexicon, the word designates reluctance to deny that the difference between men and women is that of nature, not nurture – and that the difference can’t be reversed on a say-so.
Miss Rowling’s take-your-award-and-shove-it act was prompted by millions of cretinous protests following her seemingly unassailable remark that women menstruate. That physiological tendency can’t be acquired, nor made irrelevant, simply by ‘identifying’ as a woman – any more than a rapid increase in the melanin count can’t result from ‘identifying’ as black.
Sky News magnanimously acknowledged this morning that biological differences between the sexes do exist. However, its presenters could also see the other side of the argument, namely that, by stating that biological fact, Miss Rowling caused great offence, and possibly irreparable psychological damage, to the “trans community”.
The implication is that the psychological damage in question supersedes that already suffered by those wishing to change their natural sex – and that such traumatised people make up a community speaking in the same voice.
In fact, many disturbed men who went the whole hog to become sideshow women support Miss Rowling. They resent the poltroons who shun surgery and still insist they are as womanly as, well, Miss Rowling. Who, to my experienced eye, is very womanly indeed.
But their resentment doesn’t make a dent in the ideology of Sky News – nor, more to the point, in the readiness of its millions of viewers to have their opinions deformed by these opinion formers. That’s the pandemic for you.
The totalitarian at work is woke. merely agreeing with us is not enough. You must avidly support too. JK now a marked “man”.
If the lass delivered the selfsame bunkum not in tantrums and like a bully, but civilly instead, she would not be taken seriously by the grown-ups.
When I read one of your books on modernity years ago, Mr Boot, I thought it was excellent (still do) but a little unfair in its treatment of the type you designate as ‘modman’. Now I see that I was wrong.
‘Too harsh’ I meant to say, not ‘unfair’..