The pseudo-religious cult of Covid, and the Blairite Cultural Revolution. My latest conversation with Mike Graham (7/12/2020)

Alan Thomas
As I said I would take the vaccine if I could. If for nothing else my miniscule contribution might aid in boosting public confidence to get the country out of this mess. I do not believe in conspiracies involving "the great reset", the Gates foundation or anything else. I believe lockdowns to be an irrational political fad caused by panic and governments not wanting to be out of step with each other or blamed for deaths. I think it is due to too much media driven hysteria and the wide scale credulity afforded to the CCP's approach in Wuhan mingling with a general tendency to over inflate health concerns and a belief that people need protecting from themselves.

Posted by: The ghost | 13 December 2020 at 02:09 PM
-The jury system the very poorest of a brilliant idea. Tried before ones peers.-

On the 'Today' programme, Radio 4, 28 November 2012, a media law expert, Caroline Keen, said [in part]:

"I think what we need to do is go back to basics and look at why do we have juries in the first place. The idea was that you'd have 12 good peers who knew you, testing allegations. In those days they would have known any other allegations about you in the village in which you lived..".

Wikipedia states that in the historical past:

“Medieval juries were self-informing, in that individuals were chosen as jurors because they either knew the parties and the facts, or they had the duty to discover them. This spared the government the cost of fact-finding. Over time, English juries became less self-informing and relied more on the trial itself for information on the case. Jurors remained free to investigate cases on their own until the 17th century. The Magna Carta being forgotten after a succession of benevolent reigns (or, more probably, reigns limited by the jury and the barons, and only under the rule of laws that the juries and barons found acceptable), the kings, through the royal judges, began to extend their control over the jury and the kingdom.”

Elaine Quraishi | 14 December 2020 at 06:55 AM is qite right that I "didn't take Civics in the 12th grade". That's because I wasn't educated in America, and indeed I have only the vaguest idea what the 12th grade might be.

However, I have long admired the Federal structure embodied in the US Constitution. In another area, commerce, what goes on in a state is that state's sole business - until a state-line is crossed, whereupon it becomes "inter-state commerce", and a matter for DC.

In my view that's a sound principle. If a dangerous product is manufactured in one state, and sold in that state and that state only, then it is reasonable to say that it is no business of inhabitants of other states. But once it is sold in other states then it becomes their business.

It seems to me that if this principle is good enough for commerce, then it ought to be good enough for elections too. The outcome of an election to the Pennsylvania state legislature is of interest only to the inhabitants of Pennsylvania, and if it was crooked then it is up to Pennsylvanians to fix it.

But an election to determine who occupies the White House? That is important to every citizen of every state. If some component of that election is crooked then surely it is a legitimate concern of the citizens of all states? And if that reasoning is correct, then surely it is the duty of the Supreme Court to examine any allegation of malpractice?

As to whether or not the Texas lawsuit had any merit, I will repeat what I said in an earlier post:

"This is a bit like the link between cigarette smoking and cancer. Statisticians noticed it decades before the medics were able to explain the causation mechanism. And the tobacco companies used this situation to block any attempt to restrict smoking.

"The statistical evidence is overwhelming that the election was rigged. But, as with smoking, statistical evidence is not enough to constitute legally-admissible evidence.

"We have seen that it has taken months to gather legally-admissible evidence against something as simple as the hooligans who threw that statue into the harbour in Bristol."

Anybody with a knowledge of statistics will see that the likelihood that the election was honest is about the same as the likelihood that I shall win $10 million in the lottery next week. Both events are highly improbable, but they are not impossible - which is why it cannot be used, and why hard evidence is needed.

The Texas application appeared to contain such hard evidence. Was it valid? Nobody knows, because it wasn't tested. It should have been.

Posted by: Elaine Quraishi | 18 December 2020 at 03:29 AM (etc)

-"That's probably true, which is why I don't comment here very often.
But for the non-dunderheads who may have read it, maybe it was worth it."-

American journalist and author John Zmirak writes:

’Most College Humanities and Social Science Programs Have Become Enemies of Freedom and Reason’:

”… whole disciplines have turned against ideals of reason, free discourse and objectivity, and rest their conclusions instead on untestable, aggressively political dogmas whose premises are unquestioned.

In fact, if a student or teacher attempts to question them, he will simply be punished, academically or professionally. Thus they operate less as intellectual fields of inquiry than intolerant, man-made religions — or ideologies.

That word means more than just “worldview.” It’s a term for a set of intellectual rationalizations for positions you chose for non-rational reasons, such as the craving for money, power, privilege, or revenge.

An ideology is a half-baked idea with a fully loaded pistol.

The great critic of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism, Eric Voegelin, explained how to distinguish a legitimate, grounded worldview from an ersatz religion, or ideology.

In The New Science of Politics, he noted that ideologues defend their systems not by anticipating objections and answering them, but instead by *forbidding the questions*.