Going off the deep end

Collins Dictionary

If you say that someone has gone off the deep end, you mean that their mind has stopped working in a normal way and their behaviour has become very strange . . .

The Free dictionary

To overreact; to let one's emotions carry one away. The “deep end” presumably means the deep water at the end of a swimming pool, which it is rash to enter . . .

I’m still trying to figure out whether my last article is evidence that I’ve gone off the deep end. In that article I took a look at a piece published on some website I’d never heard of, by a (supposed) organisation I’d never heard of, talking about how drinking coffee is white supremacist.

It’s an absurd claim, yet consistent with many similarly absurd claims we’ve heard over the last few years. One I read about a while back was a claim from someone in the UK that having dairy products on a school menu was white supremacist/racist. I can no longer remember all the details, I think it might have been around the Southampton area in the UK and, even worse, I am beginning to wonder whether that was some kind of troll or hoax.

It’s a point many have made, but I can no longer easily tell the difference between parody and reality. Was the coffee piece a parody? I can’t say with a high degree of confidence one way or the other.

All you need to do to produce a realistic ‘parody’ these days is to take some actual woke bonkerish and tweak it a bit.

The bonkerish isn’t just found on some random website, though. My head still spins a bit when I recall¹ an article from WaPo that claimed John Williams’ music from Star Wars was (effectively) racist. The article all but makes this claim explicitly. The article’s a bit confused. It attacks Williams for his (apparent) use of non-European music to denote the “bad guys”, but also attacks the film industry for not employing the right ethnicity of composer when using non-European music. Stay in your (musical) lane, guys and gals. If you’re ‘white’, how dare you attempt to compose ‘non-white’ music!

Star Wars is also racist, apparently, because Darth Vader is a black guy.

It’s nearly half a century (!!) since Monty Python’s movie The Life of Brian which, amongst other classic comedy clips, contains the famous ‘Loretta’ sketch.

It doesn’t seem so much parody as prediction here in 2023.

I have to admit that the continual drip, drip, drip of all of this bonkerish has had an emotional effect on me.

There’s a jarring sense of disbelief as I try to compute the how and why people can believe such turds of ‘wisdom’. There’s a sense of frustration that it’s hard to properly address the bonkerish without being branded as some evil right-wing Darth Vader type. There’s a sense of hopelessness too; is this really the direction that we, as a society, are heading?

There’s anger too. They’re taking all sorts of stuff that was once precious about our culture and shitting all over it. Free speech, punctuality, a work ethic, reason and rationality, colour-blindness as an ideal, freedom and individuality, and so on.

The woke bonkerish tribe seem to want an impossible level of freedom when it comes to things like sexuality and gender, but when it comes to things like being able to freely voice an opinion, or the freedom to reject some experimental injection? Not so much².

It’s hard not to go off the deep end a bit when faced with the depth and range of absurdity that is the woke bonkerish of 2023.

Is it just that we flawed humans are basically just a bunch of cretinous, clueless clowns? Or are there darker elements at play?

By 2025 I probably won’t be able to use the adjective darker because it is ‘racist’.

It’s already happening. Oxfam’s recently published “guidelines” on the use of inclusive language (whatever that is) recommends that terms like field work should not be used because it has racist connotations³. They're only guidelines but, of course, we all know what will happen to any employee who decides not to go along with them.

It’s the same with the fetish for announcing one’s pronouns and including them in your email signature (etc). If you don’t do this you can be easily identified as not being on board with the program.

I wonder when we’ll have our bank accounts frozen for refusing to state our pronouns? Definitely a bit off the deep end that one - but is it, really? If someone is ‘identified’ as being a member of some “hate” group, or too closely associated with them, then there is a real threat of the withdrawal of access to necessary financial services. PayPal, for example, can even keep the money people have paid you (not them), if you ‘violate’ their terms.

Even supporting a non-violent act of public disobedience/protest (complete with trucks, loud honking of horns and bouncy castles) can get your bank accounts frozen in Trudeau’s Canazida.

Behave yourselves. Accept whatever deranged diktat we’ve cooked up for you. Or Else.

It’s no wonder I might have gone off the deep end.

Faced with a deluge of bonkerish that’s coming from all directions, it’s hard to maintain some sense of proportion. It’s hard not to cast everything in terms of some nefarious agenda.

15 minute cities. The sale of new petrol cars banned from 2030 (in the UK). Eat insects. Net zero. Wind and solar as technologically viable solutions to generate the power for an entire country. Losing employment if you don’t get the latest experimental injection. Getting arrested for calling someone a muppet. Getting arrested for (silently) praying within 500m of an abortion clinic. Getting fired for creating an ‘unsafe’ work environment if you think biology might just matter. Getting fired for making the OK symbol. Being classed as a domestic terrorist for supporting Trump. Having the historical works of authors edited to remove offence. Endless diversity training at work. The idea that hiring purely based on merit is racist and/or white supremacist. Expressing that idea is deemed offensive (it’s on the list of microaggressions). Being criminalised for gathering together to pray, but welcomed and encouraged when gathering together to protest against racial injustice. Being fined for re-posting offensive rap lyrics. Being questioned by police who “want to check your thinking”. That if you say you’re a woman (man) you ARE a woman (man). That if you’re a gay guy who doesn’t find a ‘man’ with a vagina attractive, then you’re a bigot.

This is just a very quick list of things - you will all be able to add so very many more.

I’m beginning to think that some indigenous tribe who think the wind is caused by the flatulence of the sky god BuggerNuts after he’s eaten too many star beans have a firmer grasp on reality than we do.

It’s close to the 3-year anniversary of the first lockdown in the UK because of the CoronaDoom. We should never forget how crazy ‘we’ (the collective we) went. Did you ever think you’d be told by your governments what is ‘essential’ for you to be able to buy? No? Me neither. But it happened. Did you ever think you’d get advice from your government on the ‘safest’ positions to have sex, or to try kissing with masks on? No? Me neither. But it happened.

People, normal everyday people, just accepted this kind of utterly clueless shit in droves. It was very depressing.

We went off the deep end (as a society) over a virus that was in overall statistical terms not much more consequential than an outbreak of a very serious flu. The graph of Swedish data makes the point very clearly - and remember that Sweden was castigated for doing the ‘wrong’ thing, for conducting an unwarranted and unscientific ‘experiment’ on its population. So, on this basis, the CoronaDoom should have ravaged through Sweden like the proverbial bull, on steroids and meth, in a China virus shop.

You can see just how serious it was

Our governments spent colossal sums of money ‘fighting’ this virus. They implemented the most outlandish and restrictive ‘rules’ and rigorously enforced them. Nothing worked. Not. A. Single. Effing. Thing. Worked.

Think about all that money when you’re deciding whether to eat or heat.

Some really top class folk have recently announced they’re winding down their efforts on analysing the CoronaDoom (eg Jikkyleaks and Joel Smalley) and that’s fair enough. It’s been an exhausting three years. There isn’t really very much ‘new’ to add - and in my view there hasn’t been for almost 3 years. Much of what enfolded was obvious almost from the outset. It’s still important to keep a watchful eye on the Goo, though.

It’s very, very important, however, that we don’t forget. We cannot afford to go through another global derangement like this - and all signs are that they’re ramping up another global derangement over the climate ‘crisis’ that will dwarf the insanity of covid.

I’m OK swimming in the deep end a bit. We might not end up with some murky sinister global cartel of the uber elite controlling us, but if what governments put in place looks to all intents and purposes like there is, then how are we better off?

We can’t tell the difference from parody and reality any more, but maybe we’re not going to be able to tell the difference between global conspiracy and ‘government’ any more, either.

1. It was fascinating that when I was first searching for this article on Google, I couldn’t find it coming up. It was quite high on the list when I used DuckDuckGo. Would it be going off the deep end too much to suggest there’s some algorithmic skullduggery going on here?

2. Of course this wasn’t uniquely a ‘woke’ position with regard to the Jab of Joy. But I think you’d be hard pressed to find a proponent of bonkerish who argued that the coercion employed to get jabbed was abhorrent.

3. The impeccable “logic” runs like this. Black people were enslaved and made to work in fields. Therefore, referring to field work is traumatizing to black people.