Ghost Trained

We are taught to fear imaginary dangers, while genuine threats are dismissed as mere illusion.

Mum lifted me out of the bath full of Matey bubbles and started towelling me dry. So I guess I must have been quite young at the time. Because she had definitely stopped doing that by, at least, my mid thirties.

Once she’d towelled away the excess water, and it felt, the top layer of skin, she told me to hold my arms up, so she could administer a couple of squirts of deodorant.

I demurred. No thanks I said. I don’t want that.

Mum was incredulous. Why not? It’ll make you smell nice.

I didn’t want to say. But after a nanosecond of gentle prodding I told her.

There was a hole in the ozone layer. Which was there because of all the deodorant. And if we didn’t stop using it. The hole would get bigger and bigger, and then all the polar bears would die.

It was true. I had seen it on Blue Peter.

Mum looked at me like the junior idiot I was, doused me head to foot in a thick cloud of sweet smelling, planet killing miasma, and sent me to bed.

This was the first time in my life I can remember being aware of an existential threat. Not that I knew what ‘existential’ meant. I just knew that fixing the ozone layer was urgent. If we didn’t do it soon, then all the animals, and a lesser concern to me, all the people, would die.

I simply could not understand how my mum could continue merrily spraying me with Arrid Extra Dry Sure in the face of such catastrophe.

Of course all the people and animals did not die.

There really was a hole in the ozone layer, and a big one. But rather than ban deodorant, and consign the world to the stink of what we used to call B.O. we came up with an alternative to ozone depleting CFCs in aerosols, and used those instead. Simples.

No one noticed. The world hardly missed a beat. No one lay down in front of lorries to stop Henry Cooper selling the great smell of Brut. The only soup in our art galleries came courtesy of Andy Warhol. And top politicians didn’t sit around enraptured, while goblin faced children inspirational young thought leaders, catastrophised about the End Times.

How things have changed.

Every day we have, paraded in front of us, in ever more shrill tones, a rogues gallery of supposedly existential threats.

Threats which exist on a spectrum. Some real. Many exaggerated. Some, simply magicked up out of nothingness. While others are little more than an exercise in misdirection.

We are being encouraged to treat imaginary dangers as real, while at the same time ignoring genuine, and often state sponsored, threats to our lives, liberties and cultures.

And usually, once each danger has served its purpose, these super scary, terrifying threats are unceremoniously discarded. Abandoned unwanted. Surplus to requirements and forgotten. An embarrassing reminder of past passions.

Like a portly Prince’s former teenage masseuse.

We are currently experiencing over 1000 excessive deaths a week in the UK. That’s 52,000 a year for the maths intolerant.   

Not far short of the 60-80,000 annual excess deaths we suffered, during Covid. (It’s complicated, but I based these figures on studies outlined here).

And we locked ourselves in our homes, closed down our entire economy, imperilled our children’s education, and watched Joe Wicks on our laptops, because of that.

And yet now, no one in power seems to give a monkey’s. A thousand excess deaths a week warrants little more than a shrug.

Why are all these extra people dying? Could be this. Could be that. Just don’t mention the vaccines. Whatever it is, it’s not worth getting stressed out about apparently. Move along, nothing to see here.

To reiterate. I’m not saying Covid was a nothing. You don’t spend millions of dollars in a secret Chinese/American gain of function bio lab to create a ‘nothing’

Just that it was nothing compared to what they claimed it was. It certainly represented a threat to the old and vulnerable. I lost my own dad. But whether to the virus or the lockdown. I’m not sure. (I’m pretty sure.)

It’s just that now the terrifying spectre of ‘excess deaths’ has served its purpose. The fearmongers have packed up their PPE (Shout out to Michelle Mone!) and moved on.

However Covid, and more specifically, the lockdown, did represent an existential threat to our way of life.

It was used to promote the idea, endorsed by pretty much every supposedly democratic western state, and now seemingly entrenched in our culture, that our freedom is a necessary price to pay for our safety.

We accepted, and according to the super depressing polling, wholeheartedly accepted, an authoritarian shift of the Overton Window, an erosion of our rights, and the suspension of our basic freedoms, in response to a virus with a more than 99% survival rate.

But forget Covid, the greatest extinction level threat we face is the Climate Apocalypse. (Neé Change)

A huge amount has been written, not least by me, about how the genuine threat of climate change has been vastly exaggerated as a means to reshape society so it better reflects the disdainful tastes of our progressive elites.

I’m not going to retread the arguments, but very much recommend you read the Daily Sceptic article here. (I know there are lots of links to the Daily Sceptic in this article. But it seems to be one of the few outlets which report this stuff. Weird right?)

Which details Clintel’s World Climate Declaration, a report by 150 proper scientists, Nobel Prize winners among them, which concludes ‘There is no Climate Emergency.’

Not too surprising when you consider that during Greta Thunberg’s lifetime, global temperatures have risen by a sweltering 0.1 degrees C.

But climate change does in fact represent a genuine threat to regular people.

At least the government’s response to it does.

A de-industrialised Net Zero future as described by our policymakers seems designed to plunge us all into cold, hunger and poverty, while at the same time handing global hegemony to China.

The CCP, while happy to pay lip service to green policies, is not daft enough to actually sacrifice the Chinese economy, and the prosperity of its newly minted citizens, on the altar of environmental alarmism.

But it is smart enough, to not only stand by as we throw ourselves lemming like off an economic precipice, but to give us a helpful shove, by flooding the West with cheap EVs, and supplying over 90% of the world’s solar panels, while selling us the steel we need for our windmills. (Windmills!!! What is this, Camberwick Green?)

(One for Gen Z there. ) Steel which has been manufactured using energy from one of China’s 1142 coal fired power stations. Although that figure is likely to be out of date. Because they are currently opening two new ones, a week.

Just this week it was announced that Chinese company BYD has overtaken Tesla as the world’s best selling EV car manufacturer.  

Not only is China happy to provide us with the means of our own economic destruction. It is making us pay for the privilege.

It’s not that the risk from China is ignored, it is just that we are encouraged to believe that an even greater threat to our future comes from poor people catching planes, poor people driving cars, and poor people putting the heating on.

It’s nonsense.

Closer to home, mine anyway, Britain’s most vainglorious politician, Mayor Sadiq Khan has introduced ULEZ, an ‘Ultra Low Emissions Zone’. Now he charges drivers £12.50 a day to ‘protect’ us Londoners from the chimera of imaginary pollution.

A kid choking miasma which is supposedly so bad it is killing 4000 residents a year. A number which is 2.5 the number of British people killed each year in road accidents. So it clearly is not remotely credible. (I did a detailed takedown of this mad cap claim in this article. )

While at the same time Khan balks at tackling anything that poses a genuine, actual threat to Londoners. Hazards like knife crime, street violence, organised shoplifting gangs, soaring drug use, Islamic terrorism (apparently not a threat at all, simply ‘part and parcel’ of living in a big city ), and anti Jewish marches, and attacks on synagogues.

Sadiq Khan is enriching his office, to the tune of £4m a week, by charging Londoners £12.50 a day to ward off ghosts.

It’s like a real world episode of Scooby Doo. We pull the mask off the Smog Monster only to discover that underneath the disguise it really is just the local mayor, grifting for cash and credit.

As well as funny smells Khan, like so many sanctimonious, joy sapping progressives is also obsessed with another largely imaginary threat.

Hate.

‘Hate’ is a nonsense term. It means nothing. Or more accurately, it means anything.

Anything that our close minded, group thinking, intolerant elites want it to.

A catch-all term for everything they deem unacceptable, problematic, repugnant, or more importantly, a challenge to their authority.

It’s not real. It’s a made up monster. A tool of control, and oppression.

Britain is one of the most tolerant, open societies in the world. Sure there are legions of trolls saying nasty things on Twitter/X. But that’s no more the real world, than the Bullingdon Club represents the average British youngster you’d find hanging out at a Camden youth club. It’s simply not representative.

Hate crime legislation is the Swiss army knife of authoritarianism. A multi bladed tool of censorship, despotism and suppression.

It’s also misdirection, because focusing on the chimera of ‘hate’ allows the elites to tackle their real target, free speech.

Most British people have traditionally had a high regard for the concept of free speech and open debate. And that is a problem for the illiberal elites, because, such as they are, our open and liberating free speech rights, are in direct opposition to their closed and restrictive hate crime laws.

Which is why free speech is under such a sustained and ideological assault by the forces of despotism, intolerance and repression.

The latest tactic, seen most recently on the attacks on this very platform, is to stigmatise free speech by attempting to associate it with nazism and the ‘Far Right’.

Of course free speech is the greatest weapon that old fashioned liberalism has ever produced. It has been the cornerstone of every civil rights movement in Western history, from gay rights to the American civil rights movement , and women’s rights.

Attempts by the ruling elite to vilify free speech is like a jailer attempting to stigmatise the key to your cell.

‘You don’t want to be free. Freedom is toxic.’ Is literally their argument.

Unfortunately this tactic, as promoted by the propaganda wings of the illiberal elites, such as the BBC, the American mainstream media and a multitude of supposedly ‘independent’ left wing  pressure groups, ‘fact checkers’, and ‘verifiers’ including Media Matters, Hope Not Hate and The Trusted News Initiative, seems to be working. Censorship has never been so popular.

While ‘hate’ and its twin racism are presented as the ever present evils of British society,  mass immigration is promoted as a universal good, supposedly enriching us all, economically, demographically and culturally.

We are constantly reminded how vital the steady stream of new arrivals is for the well being of Britain.

We are encouraged to look the other way. And not even question whether, forcing school children to apologise, under threat of violence, for scuffing a book, Hindu mobs battling Muslim rioters on the streets of our cities, or granting residency to Albanian crime lords, is actually a social benefit.

Multiculturalism represents a danger not because it mixes the races, quite the opposite, it is a policy which sees as its end goal, the division, segregation and Balkanisation of our society. Surely integration, not ghettoisation should be our goal. Apparently not.

And you’d think we’d have learned our lesson. ‘Multi-culturalism’ certainly didn’t seem to usher in a rainbow hued era of calm and tolerance in Northern Ireland.

I can’t remember the Orange Men joining hands with the Provos in the 70s to march through West Belfast declaring ‘Diversity is our strength’

We are warned by everyone from Rishi Sunak to Elon Musk that killer AI threatens to destroy us. That if we’re not careful the machines will take over and enslave us.

Though only after they have done our kids’ homework and written Claudine Gay’s next dissertation, of course.

And it’s true. AI does pose a risk to us all.

But the immediate jeopardy doesn’t come from Alexa forcing us into a life of servitude, turning the tables, and asking us about the weather for a change.

But instead the real and present danger of AI is it becoming the tool of repressive regimes, which have already worked out how machine learning and large language models like Chat GPT can be used to police our internet use, monitor our political opinions, and assign us with CCP style social credit scores.

Of course no one mentions this threat. Because our censorship loving bosses do not consider this as the danger of AI. To them it is the overriding benefit

I could go on and on. Describe how cash is being repositioned as a hazard, vilified as the vector of disease, (not true) and the preserve of pedos and crooks, in a bid to move us to all digital money, and a repressive future built around CBDC.

How ‘too much’ democracy is a danger when in the hands of ‘low information’ voters, the easily fooled masses, bovine dolts, puppets of demagogues and tricksters. And how the only defence is to ‘protect democracy’ by embracing technocracy, and saving voters from making the ‘wrong’ choice, by removing candidates from ballots.

How it is imperative we restructure society, and sacrifice our freedoms to protect us from Bitcoin, nationalism, buff men and ultra processed foods.

But that’s enough for now.

To keep us in our place, scared, cowed, and dependent, our leaders have invented a never ending carousel of catastrophe, a self refreshing litany of horrors, willed into existence to justify their well paying jobs, privilege, and scolding superiority.

Horrors they insist, which are only solvable by combining their gentle, anti-democratic munificence with the parasitic draining of our hard eared wages, pensions and savings, or by restricting our rights, and divesting us of our freedoms.

And let’s be honest. We share some of this responsibility. Often we are happy to nod along with the narrative, clinging to mummy’s apron in the dark, seeking safety from the made up monsters lurking under our beds.

But what are we so scared of?

Humanity has survived every single ‘existential’ threat it has ever come up against.

Every one.

Plague. World Wars. Nuclear weapons. Dinosaurs.

So far at least, we have bested them all.

We have achieved, or are in the process of achieving, every single challenge we have ever set ourselves.

We have looked out of the window and using our eyes and brains, worked out how to weigh the universe.

We are amazing.

Humanity is not threatened by marginally warmer winters. Humankind will not read a nasty post on Twitter/X and de-evolve into a bestial state of hatred and violence.

We shall not be enslaved by our own machines. Or suffocated by air in our cities, air which is cleaner now than it was before the invention of the motor car.

The real threat to the progress of our civilisation comes from our doomsaying elites. Who present us with catastrophe, and then use the manufactured fear against us. Who refuse to think anything but the worst of us. Who throw up their hands at every set back, blip or problem, and pretend each heralds the onset of a new Apocalypse.

We should disdain their nonsense. Ignore their spectres, phantoms and fright night fantasies.

These are only ghosts.

They have no power to cause us harm.

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Thank you for reading Low Status Opinions.

I hope you enjoyed this article. If you did, please share it, and even better, subscribe and share it. It really helps me grow this Substack, especially since I’m not really on other social media like Facebook or Twitter/X.

This article was getting a bit long ( I know, they’re always a bit long. But, Hey! I enjoy writing.) and I nearly ditched the bit about AI not posing a threat. But then I decided to keep it, because I thought that there might be some pushback about my lack of concern.

So if you think that AI will enslave us all, we could maybe debate it in the comments.

Also. Happy New Year to you all.

Wishing you a prosperous 2024 from everyone here at Low Status Opinions. (Still just me.)

NB. I find Midjourney baffling so AI art from: https://hotpot.ai/art-generator