I’ve never been one for New Year celebrations. There seems always to be a missing element – that is, something worth celebrating. Leaving aside the macro picture as 2022 dawns, I’m unable at the start of any year to get excited about 31 becoming 1. In the London of Thatcher’s era, conspicuous insistence on wealth displays ensured that a catered New Year’s Eve was de rigueur, along with formal attire and simply lashings of Champagne, preferably Krug. One took a delivery of ice around six pm, plonked the first four cases in the original art deco bath on the first floor, and waited for the more enthusiastic alcoholics to turn up.
One particular chap I had long ago spotted as an avid climber of the North Face of social demography was to be found, at our 1990 event, flat out on said bathroom floor by eight-thirty. Six months later, he ran off with my wife. It’s nice when one’s friends help out in the bad times: this fellow always went one better by helping himself at all times.
The 1980s in general represented (for me anyway) a decade of overwork, greed, damaged moral compasses and tedious exercise, during which there was a constant – almost desperate – search to find new ways to consume. Lunch having been rejected as ‘strictly for wimps’, these pretty well always involved after-hours mind-alteration via speed, cocaine and alcohol, the wacky-baccy sector having long since become associated with bored geography teachers labouring for Lambeth Council, and social workers fomenting Scargillism in Haringey. As always unable to face the innate hunter-gatherer element of Man, the harder Left spent its time splitting off from the Labour Party into various niches of increasingly unelectable schematics that inevitably became in turn schismatic. Thus did the Eighties become the first of several political Grand Canyons where the majority Zeitgeist was to be relaxed in the company of copious vulgarity, while a sizeable minority felt this would all end in tears, and a microscopic minority thought it would end in revolution.
Just as today – but less noticeable because there were no social media back then – minority ‘liberals’ like me spent much time preaching that the End was Nigh, and grumbling about selling off Britain’s family silver and council houses. What we almost never did was come up with A Better Way for each citizen to realise their maximum potential in life.
If one scans the twitters and facebooks of the current epoch the same is true in relation to the whole virus > vaccine > Reset > cash abolition under way: we all (myself included) ask over and over, “Why can’t these dumbo 7/8ths see what is so obviously going on here?” I have – after some deeper than normal thinking over the last fortnight – at last realised what a complete waste of time such tweets and blogs are.
It is what it is – they think we’re selfish and mad, we think they’re dangerously gullible. But it’s time to stop giving pig-singing lessons: we won’t get a song, and it just annoys the pigs….as well as us.
In turn, I think we should turn off the “there will be blood in the streets and then these swine will have to face the music” knob: no there won’t, and no they won’t. Many of the buggers will make good their escape. Get over it – twas ever thus.
Three tasks face us.
The first is to become far more edgy and creative about communicating holes in the Establishment narrative, and some of the more seamy motives involved;
The second is to focus on key high-profile figures and catch them red-handed;
The third is to set critiques in a context that looks at dysfunctionality among the current institutions of the financialised capitalist system under which we live…be they political, health, social, educational or monetary in nature.
I want the title ‘A better way’ to become a recognisable and regular feature of The Slog, covering the entire gamut of “society” and how we promote better values than the serial virtue signalling hypocrisies of recent years. Furthermore, I want to challenge shibboleths in all the sizes and colours, and help prepare the ground for a world that is more just, empirical and accountable as opposed to privileged, ideological and generally above the law.
The piece I wrote yesterday (right, shadowbans assumed) did nevertheless do very well as a simple example of how to present a twisted Government view – ie, “official” – of what military intelligence ought to aim for in a dystopian future of permanent war and mendacious propaganda.
But we can go a lot further than that. We can pulverise the weaknesses of those private sector sociopaths who continue to promote belief in ineffectual mRNA messenger drivel…for some reason, Kate Bingham springs to mind.
Or we can set up stings and traps to catch the likes of Grant Shapps, Alok Sharma, Nadhim Zahawi and others of a bent nature.
I hope, in the coming weeks, to help organise such things and cooperate with the many still honest journos who see the real need to undermine belief in the madness.
But A Better Way will remain primarily a forum for those who place human empiricism far above ideological systemics.
Stay tuned.
The Slog 