Non Sequitur
Toby Young takes comfort in a clown show
source
At the immensely helpful Daily Sceptic, upon the Telegraph's announcement of its possession and serial discloure of the Hancock "Lockdown Files," Toby Young writes:
Needless to say, the messages confirm the Daily Sceptic‘s general position at the time, namely, that the Government’s pandemic response was prompted by political calculation, not ‘the Science’. The files give the impression that nearly everything the Government did to try to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 – social distancing, tiers, lockdown, masking, closing schools, restricting access to care homes – was just nonsense it made up as it went along, desperate to be seen to be doing something.
I think they also confirm my own analysis of the Government’s pandemic response, which is that it wasn’t part of some grand plot long planned in advance – the plandemic – but just a series of cock-ups made by people of limited intelligence desperate to shore up their own positions. A clown show, not a conspiracy.
The first half of this is rightly qualified by "needless to say." What the Sceptic thought at the time didn't really need confirmation; the correctness of the position it took was entirely obvious, and the predominance of political calculation over actual science only too predictable.
The second half, indicating that Mr Young thinks his own view vindicated—viz., that what we’ve all been through, and are still going through, was "a clown show, not a conspiracy"—would be correctly qualified by this: Non sequitur.
That there are clowns on display, even clowns of doubtful morality or obvious immorality, in no way demonstrates that the work of criminals is not also on display. That the actions of the clowns seem poorly rehearsed, even spontaneous, does not mean that the actions of the criminals are not well rehearsed.
Mr Young's view accounts for some of the evidence. It does not account for a good deal of the evidence. Perhaps he finds it comforting to put it all down to cock-ups by people of limited intelligence. I know I would. In that case there is always hope that people of more intelligence will be found to set things right. But the other possibility remains, and it has the better of the evidence, so far as I can tell: There has already been a great deal of intelligence at work, intelligence that counts on the clowns, and laughs at them too.
But let us wait and see what has been found. That's always a good idea. Afterwards we can argue about what it actually displays, and how it bears (if at all) on what has been said on sites such as Desiring a Better Country, including what was said by those cited in the previous post.
Perhaps I should add that in Canada we know very well how to combine the clownish and the criminal, though the figure above is not Mr Trudeau.
Update: Eugyppius takes the same line, as I expected him to:
It always irritates some people when I say this, but it’s just the truth: The people responsible for the last three years of economic destruction, psychological injury and mass pharmaceutical experimentation are callous and evil, but they’re also just really dumb. None of this meant anything, none of this was for anything, and that’s the bitterest pill of all.
It’s only the last line that I think misguided, indeed blinkered. When I get time, I’ll address what is missing, which is twofold, as some of my own readers will anticipate. Meanwhile, they might ponder the pre-Hancock musings of the Naked Emperor and of Naomi Wolf.
It’s not all a clown show, though clown shows there were and are in abundance; nor is it all “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing.”
PS: The debate continues here (Chudov) and here (Eugyppius). The latter, in my estimation, misreads Event 201.
Mr Young has provided a slightly longer version of the same argument in The Spectator: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/hancocks-lockdown-files-show-there-was-no-covid-plandemic/. Unfortunately it isn't really an argument, but still merely an assertion. Mr Hancock does not appear to have been taking orders, merely to have been acting presumptuously, erratically, and injuriously. This assessment, however, even if sound, supplies nothing very germane to the question. It is perfectly possible to suppose that, in the UK, as in many other places, there was no set script for covid 'measures' operating at the Hancock level—that the local pandemonium was in some sense a local product, albeit not entirely a local product—without reaching the conclusion that there was no coordinated effort to provide the occasion for such pandemonium or to take advantage of it by lending it, as far as possible, a certain tendency and even certain specifics. With all due respect, Mr Young will have to make a better case for his 'just clowns' thesis if he wants to convince those of us who don't suppose the whole issue hangs on Mr Hancock.
I'm sure Mr. Young considers himself a well-intentioned, accomplished and professional journalist, but the naivete of concluding that this is merely and only a "Clown Show", replete with its bearded ladies, mutilated dwarfs and elephantine giants who fumbled their dance steps and bungled their scripts is to miss the mark completely, in my humble commoner opinion.
In fact, let me take this opportunity to convey my own bewilderment on a grave matter: how is it that mere "horsepower intelligence" had nothing whatsoever to do with an awareness of the larger narrative in motion? Why were the professional, expertise and so-called "thinking classes" so oblivious toward the ongoing and orchestrated global calamity? How were they so easily duped, yoked and harnessed like dumb oxen in to the service of eugenicist evil? How could so many be conscripted as "useful idiots"?
Because...Cyunce?
How is it that commoners like truckers, farmers, pipe-fitters, street sweepers, garbage collectors, trench-diggers, front line workers and the like were more apt to see through the contradictions and chicanery?
Well, we know, as you've previously suggested Douglas, the that the "zone" was indeed flooded like never before in human history. Paradoxically, those whose fragile identities were most grafted to the status quo and the consensus trance and the establishment centers of power and manufactured order were the first to fall like dominoes. In turn, all the institutions populated by such credulous people fell in turn.
If this historical event was indeed a mere Clown Show, the accumulated errors would have been recognized and rectified by now. Rather, we have crossed so many Rubicons that I think we can safely(?) say that the behaviour of the perpetrators and the dumb, mute momentum of the shocked-and-awed masses seem to be pointing to its relentless continuance.
I cannot even remember or enumerate the number of "Bombshell" headlines I've come across over the last three years that in the "Old Normal" would have stopped this train in its tracks. Ditto for all the "Smoking Guns", "Explosive Revelations" and so forth. But nothing of the sort happened. "Speed of Cyunce"??? What???
Perhaps Mr. Young would do well to isolate himself in a room, tied to a kitchen chair, and fast for a few days while his mind comes to clarity and unhindered vision. While he is at it, he could listen to some of the nuggets of wisdom that Leonard Cohen left behind in his illustrious canon of work. Perhaps then he might come to a more finely honed capacity for acknowledging structured and organized evil. The process could be considered a useful form of professional re-education, such as was recently suggested for the inconvenient Jordan Peterson!
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