I’m a big believer in apologies. One of the more corrosive elements of “cancel culture” — for want of a better term — is how it denies the possibility of reform. All of us mess up in life, and most of us — I’m not quite optimistic enough to say “all” — can reflect on our mistakes and become better people.
It is hard to tell if the problem is cultural, institutional or legal, but we see it almost everywhere. The NHS managers that ignored concerns about Lucy Letby faced no consequences. I doubt anyone will really be held accountable for the Post Office scandal. Nor the many failures at the home office. The problem extends into the private sector. I'm sure Sarah Bentley will resurface with a great new job, as will Sharon White after her terrible failure at John Lewis. Simon Fox did after taking HMV into insolvency.
A former civil servant reflects on the indoctrination proffered during a counter-terrorism course she attended: https://fathomjournal.org/scandalous-indoctrination-inside-a-kings-college-counter-terrorism-course-for-uk-civil-servants/. She describes how the UK body set up to counter terrorism has effectively decided that countering terrorism is racist! It says all there is to say about the depths to which British officialdom has sunk in its pathological culture of ethno-masochism. It is a moral bankrupcy now way beyond any possiblility of rescue....this side of an eventual civilisational Deluge.
I think the punitive instinct is fully appropriate here. If people aren't really held to account, nothing will change, and I'd argue that our culture has a big problem re: an increasing inability to appropriately punish wrongdoers. I'm not one to tell the British how to run their country, but if something like this happened here I'd want to see everyone involved fired from government service and banned from all further govt jobs for life (actually what I'd really like to see is the officials themselves imprisoned, but that ain't happening). Betrayals of public trust should be taken very seriously, I think.
“How would you feel if a zookeeper who played a role in the gates of the lions’ enclosure being left open got a swanky job in health and safety?”
Forgive me, but:
As below, so above: an artificially-enhanced virus leaked, killed millions, crippled tens/hundreds of millions, brought much of the world juddering to a halt for years… And not only has there been no apology, let alone accountability, either for the disaster itself or for the cover-up that followed; those involved have been lionised, rewarded, promoted to positions of greater responsibility. To take one example, Jeremy Farrar, who as director of the Wellcome Trust was up to his neck in the conspiracy to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis (or as I prefer to call it, “bloody obvious inference from widely available information”) as a conspiracy theory, is now Chief Scientist at the WHO. And gain-of-fiction research continues apace, all over the world, as lavishly funded as ever.
So how do I feel? For one thing, I find it very hard to feel very much at all about any of the things in the news that people seem to expect I should feel strongly about. Up to and including grooming gangs. I mean, I feel sorry for the victims of course. But when it comes to indignation, the elephant above is taking up way too much of the room to leave space for anything else.
I feel that we are living in an absurd, and highly doomed, world.
Then I go back to not thinking about it. But the shadow of that unthinking persists.
It is hard to tell if the problem is cultural, institutional or legal, but we see it almost everywhere. The NHS managers that ignored concerns about Lucy Letby faced no consequences. I doubt anyone will really be held accountable for the Post Office scandal. Nor the many failures at the home office. The problem extends into the private sector. I'm sure Sarah Bentley will resurface with a great new job, as will Sharon White after her terrible failure at John Lewis. Simon Fox did after taking HMV into insolvency.
A former civil servant reflects on the indoctrination proffered during a counter-terrorism course she attended: https://fathomjournal.org/scandalous-indoctrination-inside-a-kings-college-counter-terrorism-course-for-uk-civil-servants/. She describes how the UK body set up to counter terrorism has effectively decided that countering terrorism is racist! It says all there is to say about the depths to which British officialdom has sunk in its pathological culture of ethno-masochism. It is a moral bankrupcy now way beyond any possiblility of rescue....this side of an eventual civilisational Deluge.
I think the punitive instinct is fully appropriate here. If people aren't really held to account, nothing will change, and I'd argue that our culture has a big problem re: an increasing inability to appropriately punish wrongdoers. I'm not one to tell the British how to run their country, but if something like this happened here I'd want to see everyone involved fired from government service and banned from all further govt jobs for life (actually what I'd really like to see is the officials themselves imprisoned, but that ain't happening). Betrayals of public trust should be taken very seriously, I think.
“How would you feel if a zookeeper who played a role in the gates of the lions’ enclosure being left open got a swanky job in health and safety?”
Forgive me, but:
As below, so above: an artificially-enhanced virus leaked, killed millions, crippled tens/hundreds of millions, brought much of the world juddering to a halt for years… And not only has there been no apology, let alone accountability, either for the disaster itself or for the cover-up that followed; those involved have been lionised, rewarded, promoted to positions of greater responsibility. To take one example, Jeremy Farrar, who as director of the Wellcome Trust was up to his neck in the conspiracy to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis (or as I prefer to call it, “bloody obvious inference from widely available information”) as a conspiracy theory, is now Chief Scientist at the WHO. And gain-of-fiction research continues apace, all over the world, as lavishly funded as ever.
So how do I feel? For one thing, I find it very hard to feel very much at all about any of the things in the news that people seem to expect I should feel strongly about. Up to and including grooming gangs. I mean, I feel sorry for the victims of course. But when it comes to indignation, the elephant above is taking up way too much of the room to leave space for anything else.
I feel that we are living in an absurd, and highly doomed, world.
Then I go back to not thinking about it. But the shadow of that unthinking persists.