Bonus Content: Diary of a Dissenter
To mark the advent of summertime, in a year without an Easter, summer or — the way things are looking — Christmas, I'm sending this week's Diary to all subscribers. Happy Easter!
I have been very kindly asked by some readers how they might support my work. Normally, though purely by way of an experiment in opening up to a more interactive model, I’m offering paid subscribers access to one additional article each Friday, a kind of Diary of The Week from My Window — as below. From time to time, when it seems appropriate, I’m also sending it to my general list.
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‘Far Right’ vanquished and banished shock!
SUNDAY
Do you remember about this time last year those chortling, sniggering articles about all the jiggery-pokery that was expected to go down during the lockdown? Expect a baby boom round about January, the journaliars hooted. (KnowwhadImean, knowwhadImean? Say no more, Squire! Say no more! The wit of these guys knows neither frontier nor mercy.)
Au contraire, as Sam Becket said to that Parisian driver who asked him if he was English. According to the Central Statistics Office, births have decreased by something like 6 per cent in the third quarter, down from 15,379 to 14, 477. This follows a pattern established in the previous two quarters, with total births down some 3,200 over the first three quarters of 2020.
The same picture is reported from the US, where a CBS News report of data from 29 state health departments shows a roughly 7.3 percent decline in births in December 2020, nine months after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the WHO. Sociologists are already pronouncing this the most calamitous period of decline in a history of reducing births that goes back to the 1960s. The US fertility rate is now less than half what it was in the late 1950s, having declined in various states by as much as 10 per cent in the past year. Researches who conducted a study of G**gle searches under baby-related headings like ‘ultrasound’ and ‘morning sickness’ have predicted a drop in births of 15 per cent as a direct result of the Covid horror show. Not accidental, of course, as we know.
Of course, it would never occur to the type of specimen currently posturing as journalist that the kind of scaremongering they have engaged in from the very beginning of the Covid scamdemic might actually be the cause of dissuading a significant number of people from bringing new life into the world. Not to say that something like this intuition may be central to the thinking of the Covid controllers.
MONDAY
What should plop on my laptop this week only a copy of February’s Garda Commissioners’ monthly report to the Policing Authority.
There’s a great deal of interesting information in there, but my initial interest was to do with something that, to my surprise — nay, consternation — turned out not to be there. I would have assumed that, since the Garda Commissioner hardly lets a day go by without making some kind of public intervention to alert the media//public to what he has been claiming is the growing menace of the ‘far right’ in Ireland, a sizeable chunk of such a report would be taken up with details of the force’s investigation into this phenomenon and the resultant arrests, prosecutions etc.
Not a dickey bird. The word ‘right’ appears nine times in the report: five times in reference to ‘Human Rights’; one reference to the provision of the ‘right’ amount of information in the context of ‘community policing’; one reference to the ‘right level of Garda presence’ [after the past year, might I suggest nil?]; and a double-reference in a single sentence concerning the need to ensure that ‘the right people are in place at the right time’.
The word ‘far’ does not appear in the report at all.
Most odd. One would think from the daily wash of effluent from ‘news’ platforms that the average guard spent at least half his time chasing down the ‘far right’.
After all, the report contains copious details of elements of Garda operations that we hear much less about: for example, organised crime, property crime and burglary; sexual offences; public order; stabbings; money laundering; assaults; extraditions; attestation of trainee and reserve Gardai; the Christmas and New Year Enforcement Operation; sick leave; absenteeism; number of Garda members absent due to mental health; advice to the public concerning a courier payment scam; media interviews with senior officers, including the Commissioner; risk management; ‘culture change’ (that must be the dancing!); ‘use of force’ (more ‘culture’); ‘ethic workshops’ (hahahahahahahahah) and of course Covid and Operation Fanacht.
The report also conveys the following happy news:
That An Garda Síochána has the second largest number of followers on Facebook (Tourism Ireland is first).
An Garda Síochána has one of the highest Facebook engagement rates.
An Garda Síochána has the second largest number of followers on Twitter (RTE iś first).
An Garda Síochána has the third largest number of followers on Instagram (Tourism Ireland is first).
The report also reveals that the ‘operational policing response’ to the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’ remains the number one priority for An Garda Siochána.
‘An Garda Síochána is maintaining its series of checkpoints and high visibility patrols at public amenities across the country, introduced under Operation Fanacht, and Garda personnel continue to retain a close relationship with the communities we serve by supporting and seeking out those who are vulnerable at this time.’
I’ll bet — especially those who might be vulnerable to having their arms twisted or teeth broken!
I am pleased to report, though, that members of An Garda Siochána have been well rewarded for their efforts in the industrial harassment of the Irish public. Out of a total net expenditure of €140.4m in January, ‘overtime’ accounted for €8.9m — about 7 per cent. I’m sure the average Irish taxpayer, when this is all over, will be delighted to reflect on the value-for-money represented by this expenditure.
As of 9 February 2021, records indicate that 4,351 Fixed Charge Notices’ have issued, relating to leaving home without a reasonable excuse.
‘In addition, Gardaí can now issue people with a fine for organising a party in their house or for attending such a gathering. The fine for organising a house party is €500 and attending a house party is €150. As of 9 February 2021, there have been 404 fines recorded relating to attending events in dwellings and 92 relating to those who have organised events (dwellings and non-dwellings).’
All this, being utterly contrary to the Constitution, is helpfully facilitated courtesy of the High Court and Court of Appeal, which have helpfully agreed to turn blind eyes to this illegality and dispose of any inconvenient citizens seeking to question it.
If you can get hold of a copy of this report — or indeed any of the Commissioner’s monthly reports to the authority — you should have a good read of it. Gems on every page!
And yet, nothing, as I say, of the ‘far right’. Could it be that Commissioner Harass has been telling porkie pies to the media about the prevalence of the ‘far right’ in Ireland and the efforts of his force to combat it? Or perhaps his constant mouthing on this topic has caused the ‘far right’ to disband and emigrate, and he just hasn’t yet got around to telling either the public or the Policing Authority of this great victory?
TUESDAY
Another entity obsessed with the shadowy activities of the ‘far right (so shadowy there is nothing but shadow, not a whit of substance)’ is the Irish Slimes.
Someone sent me a link to another ridiculous article on the subject by Conor Lally, the Far Right Editor of that ‘newspaper’ (his job is to cram the words ‘far right’ into as many articles as possible). ‘Irish far right fake news helps spur record number of racist incidents’, the headline screams. The report begins: ‘A record number of racist incidents were reported last year as “Irish far right fake news came into its own” and Asian people and other minorities were blamed often for the pandemic, according to the Irish Network Against Racism.’
The report was actually a report on that body’s ‘iReport’ for 2020, which outlined details of the endless examples of racism to be encountered in Ireland. Anyone reading it would be astonished that someone would want to come to Ireland from abroad. And yet, attracting foreigners does not appear to be a huge problem at the moment.
The Irish Network Against Racism director, Shane O’Curry said that, of the incidents reported last year, ‘31 of the hate speech reports related directly to the pandemic’, with Chinese people and other minorities often blamed for causing it.
Shurely shome conturdicschion?
If 'far right' groups are being criticised — as they have been for the past year — for maintaining there is no pandemic, how can they also be blamed for accusing foreigners of starting it?
WEDNESDAY
There appears to be an escalation in the kamikaze activities of Covidrones — the kind of people who approach you on the street masked up to the eyeballs, and then, at the last moment, throw themselves into the roadway to avoid breathing the same air or something. You would expect these to be predominantly older people, but they’re not. Most of them are under 30, with an average chance of dying from Covid of 300,000 to 1. They’re also predominantly, though not exclusively, female. I’m astonished there has not yet been a serous accident, since the average person, venturing on to a busy road, has a 1 in 6,000 chance of being killed.
A variation on this caper is the Covidrone who, on observing your approach, makes a big show of getting out of your way. They step into doorways or behind parking meters or street furniture. Safely tucked away, they peer out at you in obvious anticipation, obviously expecting a paean of gratitude for saving your life. When this is not forthcoming, some of these customers become quite emotional, issuing short sarcastic ejaculations like ‘You’re welcome!’ and ‘Don’t mention it!’ They really do take it badly.
It’s actually quite amazing to be at the centre of such a profound cultural dissonance. The Covidrones really, truly believe that they are engaged in a life-saving exercise, whereas the sceptic is equally certain they are merely demonstrating their stupidity. The remarkable thing is that these are not stupid-looking people. Most of them have the swagger you appear to get as an accompaniment to a university degree. Some of them actually seem to have put on their best face masks in order to come out and spend an hour saving lives, like a new kind of philanthropic hobby.
Pure tragedy, really.
THURSDAY
Our brief Substack honeymoon may be coming to an end. This platform — I mean the underlying platform, rather than Unchained — was set up in 2017 to provide a means for writers to sidestep the escalating cancel culture conditions facing those unprepared to earn their livings as journaliars. Moderation was ‘lightweight’, with no ideological constraints and no restrictions other than the obvious ones against harassment, threats, spam, pornography, and calls for violence. Now the usual dismal ‘progressives’ are beginning to see that, in driving people out of the mainstream, they have merely facilitated the establishment of a new claim to the up-for-grabs mantle of the Fourth Estate.
A couple of weeks after I set up this platform in October, the Spectator USA predicted that it was only a matter of time before ‘the media tech hall monitors turn their attention to Substack.’ Already I can hear a loudening rumbling. You have to remember that leftists, being generally devoid of talent or courage, depend on cheating and bullying to maintain position in any market or public square. There was no way they were going to just sit back and allow people whom they disagreed with to communicate their ideas to any kind of public.
According to a more recent article in the Spectator USA, some guy called Ryan Broderick, who worked for Buzzfeed until he was fired for plagiarising, has declared that, ‘It’s worth thinking about this group [he means people like me] not as a collection of writers, but instead as an online subculture that lives on Substack. They operate like any other increasingly emboldened group of power users and I suspect they will be the first big community moderation issue for Substack as a platform.’
Some trans person called Sady Doyle has accused ‘Substackerati’ of transphobia. What a surprise!
This is all, of course, nonsense. I don’t know any other Substackers, so am not part of any ‘community’. We recognise in these contributions the warning signs: the familiar language that couches everything in terms of ‘power abuse’ and phobophobia applied in this case to people who are just doing a job of work, writing their thoughts down for public consumption, offering their opinions and perspectives to the interested.
This is no longer permitted.
The author of the Spectator article, Ben Sixsmith, doubts if Substack will radically transform the media. I beg to differ. If it can continue to avoid censorship, either from inside itself or — perhaps more worryingly — from the money transfer vehicles who enable the monetising aspects, Substack is in with a chance of fundamentally remaking the media at global and local levels. It is for this reason that the situation of the ‘Substackerati’ is precarious and growing more so. Please fasten your seatbelts. Those in charge of young children, please attend to your own belt first.
FRIDAY
I see the municipal Christmas lights are still up around many parts of south Dublin, where I mostly live these days. This is in response to the governmental call in January for citizens to leave their lights in place into the new year, ostensibly to ‘cheer everyone up’ or some such mendacious construction.
It’s well beyond that now, of course. As would have been obvious from the outset the idea was bound to have quite the opposite effect: to depress everyone no end. It was, so to speak, a form of gaslighting in keeping with other elements of the Covid op: bully people into being cheerful despite the circumstances you’ve placed them in, and then watch them become even more miserable without knowing why.
The ‘why’ is obvious too: Christmas lights have a time and place, which is essentially Christmas time and the place of gathering we associate with it, which is the family home. To leave the lights in place afterwards is a way of trivialising what happens in that unique moment of the year. It is also to trick with time, a standard totalitarian ruse. The reasons are a little complicated, but fairly clear when you set them out.
We come to know ourselves through time, the topography of the continuity we call life. Each year is sketched out in advance, with markers at St Valentine’s Day, Ash Wednesday, St Patrick’s Day, Holy Week, Easter, and so on. All religious occasions, of course, and not accidentally. This has been the human way of mapping the existential journey since men first stood on their hind legs. In each year, Christmas is the ‘little destination’ that stands for the great one. It is where we are aiming for: a time of peace and joy and anticipated rest and reward.
Leaving the Christmas lights in place is not a small thing. If you think about it, one of the most depressing feelings about past Januarys has hit those times when you get to mid-month and still haven’t gotten around to stripping the Christmas tree and taking it to the tree pound. This is because the instinct of the human is to move on after each staging post. To disrupt this is to induce a kind of ennui, because time is the metric of the stories that become the measure of our lives. Unseating this sense of security is the intention behind the ostensibly considerate suggestion that we ‘cheer ourselves up’ by leaving the Christmas lights in place and lighting into the freaking mouth of Holy Week. To do so is an act of fundamental disruption of the cyclical consciousness of our lives. To see Christmas lights in the tail end of March — as I did the other evening in both Shankill and Dun Laoghaire — is not to be cheered up, but to be wearied and, actually, in the Augustinian sense, disgusted (‘Everything, eventually, turns to disgust. Everything but Christ is dung.’]
This is deliberate, have no doubt about it.
The late writer and reluctant politician Václav Havel, writing about his observations of totalitarianism in his native Czechoslovakia, spoke of the ‘nihilization’ that laid waste to his own country, arising from ideologies that laid claim to having understood history completely. The totalitarian impulse is to render the world alien to its inhabitants, and this is achieved by playing with time and its content. History, past and future, is appropriated in a manner that eliminates the human element, the human story. All the unpredictability and possibility that arises from the human capacity for endless variety are removed and replaced with a sense that the future is simply an ideological continuum from the past, and that all that is required of the citizen, the human person, is to move forward into a utopia that has been prepared according to the diktats of history. This process begins with the commandeering of time — and therefore history — by a singular viewpoint, which is then made absolute, enabling history to be reduced to that single aspect. This, wrote Havel, occurs when the ‘story’ — that which gives human history its shape and meaning and structure — is eliminated from human culture. After that, he continued: ‘Since the mystery in a story is the articulated mystery of man, his story began to lose its human content. The uniqueness of the human creature became a mere embellishment on the laws of history, and the tension and thrill in real events were dismissed as accidental and therefore unworthy of the attention of scholarship. History became boredom.’
He is talking, of course, about the story of a society, assembled through time by means of culture, historiography, commemoration, and the enactment of public rituals that give meaning to the continuity of the existence of that society and its people. At the molecular level, this process is constructed from the sequential understandings of individual citizens, which depend on all kinds of ‘little infinities’ — those splashes of joy that make the day, the week, the winter sparkle — and mutual cultural commonalities, including the succession of ‘meaning events’ that mark out the year. By playing around with these, ‘authorities’ unsettle the atomic structure of a society.
If this seems fanciful, consider the way that, when last we heard that the ‘restrictions’ might be lifted it was to be on April 5th. Yes, that would be the Tuesday of Easter Week, two days after Easter Sunday, four days after Good Friday, five days after Holy Thursday, and six days after Spy Wednesday. In other words, the plan was to deliberately, ostentatiously deprive the people of the happiness of another Easter. No matter what else you might think or say about what has been happening, you will surely agree that a government of good heart, good intentions and good authority would, at the end of a horrendous winter, have permitted people to mark these days that define their individual earthly journeys and the course of their civilisation through three millennia. But the creeps who have insinuated themselves as our leaders have different plans. Their aims include the destruction of that civilisation and the maddening of its constituent members. If you do not realise this by now, you have no idea how creepy or how ugly they really are.
P.S.
No sooner than I had polished up my Diary for ‘going to press’ than someone emailed me an article from some toerag of a so-called newspaper with a report on the latest public musings of the rainbow-socked fascists concerning what they’re going to allow the sovereign people to do over the coming months. Bear in mind here that I have been predicting for the past three or four months that 2021 would be a complete write-off freedom-wise, as the instructions from the puppet-masters require to be followed regardless of facts or circumstances. So the lying must be ramped up.
I really hate the phrase ‘You couldn’t make it up’, because I happen to think that you can make up just about anything your imagination allows you to. But this time, in view of what I’ve just written immediately above, I’m inclined to make an exception. Perhaps I might modify the phrase to, ‘You couldn’t make up what these guys will make up next’ — except that I just did.
The report, headed ‘Two more months of lockdown and Easter play dates on banned list as toll on children revealed’, reads:
‘”Moving between play dates, Patrick’s Day parties, Mother’s day parties where more and more people are coming together... they are not appreciating the risk of onward transmission,” HSE public health specialist Dr Miriam Owens said. “Children are reflecting what is in the community. What seems to be happening in the community is people are getting tired and feel it is time to relax. But it is not time to relax.”
‘Dr Owens was speaking at last night’s Covid-19 briefing where Professor Philip Nolan, who tracks the virus, revealed there was a four- to six-fold increase in children under 12 referred by GPs for testing.’
See? St Patrick’s Day; Mother’s Day. You think you can just sit around eating a lamb dinner on Easter Sunday? In a Fascist Republic?
It gets worse. An ESRI report, no less, warns about the shocking potential death toll that arises from people ‘visiting one another’s homes’ . . . to play cards.
Did you ever hear worse? Playing cards? Passing these slimy, infection-magnet cards from one to the other, slurping tea, no doubt, then wiping their mouths with the back of their hands and dealing another hand of five.
‘Dr Owens said public health doctors were finding instances where people were meeting up for a game of cards.
‘Parents were meeting up outside the school gates and creches more than they had been.
‘The return to school also means parents were able to meet up with others during the day, she added.’
This, clearly, has to stop! Cards? Meeting other parents at the school gates? Talking, I suppose!
This must stop! Life must stop! In order to stop people dying, the rest of us have to agree to stop living. What part of that do people not understand?