Wither and die!

I don’t think either of us wants the blog to wither and die. In lieu of a considered answer, I give you some knee-jerk responses.

1) Twitter has addled our brains. Short attention span / Attention Deficit is the disorder of the day.

2) Echo chambers make me sad.

3) Teachers (might) testify that force-feeding a well-worn syllabus onto yet another fresh intake is the personification of tedium. Only in this case the exam never comes. The BBC grinds on just the same. After a decade of blogging (ultimately the same old stuff), repetitive tedium injury kicks in. 

4) In the unrequited pursuit of the youth market, the Beeb has forgotten that the young eventually grow up. Stop it BBC! You are not Marks and Spencer. 

5) Monkey Brains was indeed a prolific commenter and sometimes his was the sole response to a post.  Maybe it was simply an aversion to Disqus or my own ‘rebuke’ that drove him away. He deserved his own blog.  

6) I can’t see what is wrong with the layout of Disqus. Maybe the problem is your end?

7) In days of old (when knights were bold and posts were long and thoughtful) it was even busier below the line. Check out archives circa 2016 and earlier.  

8) Personally, I feel we have almost exhausted the BBC’s bias. I’m not satisfied with endless nit-picking over the BBC’s individual transgressions any more (there’s an app for that) and I think - if we’re to continue - we need to broaden the remit. 

9) I’m not a proper Conservative by the way. I dislike the overly dogmatic anti-lockdown rhetoric one finds on TCW, and I did think the btl discussion engendered by Melanie Phillips’s (presumably now out of favour with Kathy Gyngell) attack on Lord Sumption’s anti-lockdown stance raised far more interesting, diverse and debatable points (on both sides) than the echo chamber that is the default of many Conservative-leaning blogs and websites. 

Less isolated

Here we go again. Writing a blog about BBC bias and then boasting that I don’t watch it. Well, I do watch some of it, more of which later. I have spent most of my life - say, at least half of it, being in a minority of one. (That covers opinion, ideology, ethnicity and lots of other stuff.)  Shall I name the ways? Perhaps another time.

This is leading up to one of those ‘housekeeping’ posts that bloggers have to do from time to time, usually when the comments are too sweary or too plain nasty.

Ha! I have been alone (in this blog) in supporting the lockdown strategy, one whose success is almost entirely reliant on a high degree of cooperation from the public. We know Lockdown not the only possible strategy on the table, but it’s the one that the government we voted for believes is in the country's best interest. 

Our experiment with Disqus seems to have deprived us of our most prolific commenter, but I think I’m right in saying that most of our regulars disagree with me on this topic.  I haven’t particularly engaged in the debate because (as I keep having to repeat) I am still of the opinion that it’s “too soon to know’.  I think the time for dogmatic criticism of the Government is not now. I am Mr Undecided and I’m sticking with it.

So, what’s all this a preamble to? It must be something. Okay, it’s Melanie Phillips. I don’t agree with her on absolutely everything - apart from her every word on Israel - but she too is in favour of the Lockdown approach. 

Look at this! The Times(£):

“Like every other country suffering from this pandemic, Britain faces a horrible choice between protecting the economy and safeguarding life and health. Its rate of death and serious illness from Covid-19 has been higher than most countries. The reason for that, along with other necessary criticisms about the government’s handling of this crisis, should wait until all the evidence is in.”

If you haven’t got access to the Times, I’m sorry. I don’t feel entitled to reproduce entire articles. (I did it once but I think I got away with it.)

“Yet among people for whom damage to the economy outweighs all other considerations, there’s no acknowledgement of Johnson’s complex balancing act. For such people, lockdown must end immediately. Some of them claim, moreover, that there never was any need for it in the first place. The virus, they say (with scant regard for either humanity or settled facts) poses no serious threat because it only kills relatively few old people or those who would have died this year anyway. By contrast, they say, Sweden has curbed the virus while suffering far fewer deaths than Britain, Italy or Spain without locking down its population, thus protecting its economy.”

Anyway, I feel a little less isolated now. 

As for the Disqus thing, I think the jury’s still out. We were hoping to attract a wider, livelier and more diverse disqussion below the line. We’ll wait and see what transpires. 

Cocked Hat

You’ll probably have already watched this fascinating video from Unherd (featured on Guido Fawkes.) It's Freddie Sayers’s interview of Swedish expert Prof. Johan Giesecke

Fawkes’s bullet-pointed extrapolations from the film hold good, but I would take away a few extra ones as well. 

The Swedish strategy turns out to be much less dissimilar to the UK’s than meets the eye, and Freddie Sayers’s questioning is pertinent and of a kind that the BBC repeatedly fails to put “on our behalf.”  His questions are ones that viewers themselves would actually wish to put, should they have the opportunity to do so.

For example, I spy a political underbelly here. For me, the clue lies in the professor’s fear that a strict Lockdown strategy is an inevitable route to totalitarianism and dictatorship. A very Swedish attitude.

Sayers asks if Prof. Giesecke is taking “A slightly cold-hearted approach” (and that was something that immediately struck me.)

Again, one of the most significant remarks that stood out for me (It would, wouldn’t it?) was:

“Let’s discuss this a year from now”.

If you’ve been following previous threads on this blog you’ll know what I mean.

The proliferation of this kind of direct reporting, (think also of Steven Egerton of The Sun) consistently knocks the BBC's efforts into a cocked hat.