Hands off our Consensi
I had to Google it, but I was a little disappointed to find out that the plural of consensus is actually consensuses, and not consensi.
It reminded me of the old joke
Teacher : can anyone give me an example of a word with 3 syllables?
Jemima : consensus, Miss
Teacher : very good, Jemima. Can anyone give me a word with 4 syllables?
Johnny : masturbation, Miss
Teacher : (not quite knowing how to respond) erm, that’s a bit of a mouthful Johnny
Johnny : no, Miss, that’s a blowjob
The title of today’s piece is just an excuse to talk about hands for a bit. I hadn’t listened to Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto1 for a while and so I found a performance on YouTube.
(it’s a great performance, but it’s 37 minutes long - so you might want to put it on in the background)
It is, I believe, being played by a woman. One of my favourite versions of this when I first got into classical music was by the Israeli pianist Ilana Vered who, I believe, is also a woman.
Rachmaninoff, by all accounts, had extraordinarily big hands. I have no idea what his shoe size was. Partly because of these spade-like hands his music is very difficult to play. He could do stuff with his hands that most mere mortals could not.
I have uncovered a dastardly patriarchal plot to prevent (most) women from being able to play Rachmaninoff. By assigning sex at birth we consign a generation of those labelled as women to have smaller hands. Oy, you wenches, hands off our Rachmaninoff.
This chart from a study of the hand sizes of pianists proves my point.
If only we had assigned the female pianists as male at birth they’d have been able to cope with Rach.
Not content with the consensuses (the ‘norms’) of society, progressives and gender zealots are trying to fabricate a new set of ‘norms’, a new set of consensuses. Sex is ‘assigned’ at birth, you can be whatever sex you choose to be through the miracle of self-identification, that yesterday in the UK wasn’t Mother’s Day but Birthing Person’s Day, that announcing one’s pronouns to all and sundry is essential and being ‘inclusive’ or something.
The notion of a ‘consensus’ is an interesting one. Having a set established of behaviours or norms, is pretty much essential for the smooth running of a society. There is a reason why dropping one’s drawers and taking a dump in the street is (mostly) frowned upon.
On the other hand, we should not accept something as ‘true’ or ‘good’ merely because it happens to be the current consensus position. This is neatly summed up by the satirical exhortation : Eat Shit. Several billion flies can’t be wrong.
The abhorrent practice of FGM might be a cultural ‘norm’ in some places, but it’s twisted and sick and should be universally condemned. Some practices in some cultures should never be ‘acceptable’ just because it’s a different culture and we should respect their norms.
In the political sphere, at least in the ‘west’, we use a form of consensus loosely termed as democracy to choose our leaders. So, politicians put forward their ideas hoping to appeal to the ordinary voter and get elected. This is said to be a good thing, whereas populism, the appeal to the concerns of the ordinary voter, is said to be a bad thing.
Populism is derided, of course, because it draws a distinction between the elites and the plebs. Those lovely people having a blast every year at Davos are your friends; you can trust them to look after you. Their burdens are great, their rewards greater. They will manufacture the right consensuses to keep us happy and well-fed on all of those shit-eating flies. And even if we don’t own a stitch of clothing, or a house, or be allowed to wander more than 15 minutes away from our government-provided shared housing, we’ll be happy. And the planet will be at least 0.000000342 degrees cooler.
So-called ‘scientific’ consensus is also a ‘thing’. We should certainly pay attention to any (legitimate) scientific consensus - but we should never just accept it purely because it is the consensus. Science is not a democracy.
One imagines, for example, that there is some degree of ‘consensus’ surrounding the issue of ADHD. I was kind of shocked to learn from Robert Malone’s substack that a 2014 survey conducted by the CDC came to the conclusion that over 20% of 12-year old boys were afflicted by this condition.
It’s an affliction that has a curious pattern. It seems to go away at weekends and during school holidays. The official leaflet for Ritalin (one ‘treatment’ for ADHD) even alludes to this - although it attempts to give a ‘plausible’ reason for this
During the course of treatment for ADHD, the doctor may tell you to stop taking Ritalin for certain periods of time (e.g., every weekend or school vacations) to see if it is still necessary to take it.
To use UK vernacular, they’re just taking the piss aren’t they?
If your kid can’t sit still at school, but can play Grand Theft Auto for several hours at a time, then he’s probably not suffering from ADHD. He’s probably just bored by having to learn the tenets of critical race theory.
Being on the right side of history is just about being a supporter of the consensus that eventually wins out.
Governments today, and their willing collaborators2, are in the business of manufacturing consensus. This has always been the case. The ‘struggle sessions’ in Mao’s China, for example, were a brutal attempt to enforce and instil a consensus by fear. The difference today is the technology which makes complete authoritarian control a very real threat.
A real-life old-fashioned struggle session is labour-intensive. Switching off the bank accounts of those deemed to be suffering from wrongthink can be achieved without much fuss. For maximum impact you want this to be widely publicized so that people get the message. Play along, or else.
The (fake) consensus that was established over the CoronaDoom was rigorously enforced. It is still being enforced. YouTube, for example, is still kicking people off their platform for poking fun at or criticising GOD (the Goo of Deliverance).
But it’s a private company, it’s allowed to do that. Yeah, right - the Twitter files revealed (a fraction of) the collusion between governments and ‘private’ companies that occurred in an effort to enforce a particular consensus.
The government approach is hands off our consensuses - we lovingly crafted them and they are not to be challenged.
What happened during the CoronaDoom was the establishment of a de facto consensus. Almost everywhere, all at once, governments across the world went for the whole shebang of lockdowns, masks, social distancing, etc.
Quite literally only a few weeks before this new ‘paradigm’ was established, the actual scientific consensus was exactly the opposite. The previous consensus, the one to be found in the pandemic preparedness plans of those very same governments, was deemed to be incorrect. Deemed by politicians - not scientists.
It was very interesting that in bucking the trend to a great extent Sweden was described as performing some hideous ‘experiment’ upon its population by doing what all previous evidence and experience with pandemics told us was the right course of action. With no evidence whatsoever most governments decided to conduct a real experiment on their populations and went for a whole panoply of idiotic, and experimental, nonsense.
None of it worked.
But the politicians were convinced, the media was convinced, and most ‘ordinary’ people were convinced - so that’s OK then. It was the (apparent) consensus.
Turned out to be the wrong consensus - but, hey, keep watching those episodes of 24 and the like because it’s stuff like this that primes3 us to be mortally afraid of a so-called deadly pandemic.
Having a consensus on something is OK. In science it’s a useful indicator of where the main body of evidence points us.
I’d describe certain ‘theories’ outside of this scientific consensus as ‘fringe’ or the spouting of ‘cranks’. I’d expect a similar level of derision aimed at me by the proponents of those alternative theories. All par for the course, and all part of the expected rough and tumble.
What is NOT acceptable is to attempt to censor those alternative voices. Some of the greatest scientific advances have been made precisely because there were people prepared to step outside of the consensus.
Such voices, even if they’re wrong (and most are in science), should never be silenced. It’s not just a matter of fair play. Although the ‘success’ rate is very low, every now and then one of these ‘cranks’ turns out to be right. They’re critical for the advancement of science - and there are many examples of yesterday’s heresy becoming the orthodoxy of today.
People who are prepared to step outside of the consensus are not dangerous, they’re essential.
The existence of consensus is not, in itself, a bad thing. But it’s a very bad thing to manufacture and control that consensus - as our governments have done. It’s even worse to censor any viewpoint outside of that ‘consensus’.
It’s more important to be right, than it is to be in the right crowd.
I’ll leave with a thought that occurred to me the other day concerning the current attempts to establish a consensus that anyone who identifies as a woman IS a woman. How many people, in the stillness of their own thoughts, in the absence of an audience to virtue signal to, really, truly, believe this?
If you can play Rachmaninoff really well, chances are that, even if you’re wearing lipstick and a dress, you’re a bloke.
Although, in all fairness, we should not be listening to any Russian music in order to show our support for Ukraine (although Ms Federova is Ukrainian - so it’s a difficult moral conundrum here. What’s the correct virtue signal to send out?)
Or maybe this should be the other way round - certain actors and their willing governmental collaborators?
I also wonder how many governments were ‘primed’ to behave in a particular way in the event of a pandemic. Various ‘pandemic planning’ exercises, where important people from different countries would get together, were undertaken pre-covid and did include many of the population control techniques later used during the CoronaDoom (curiously, those techniques were mostly contrary to the existing published pandemic preparedness plans)
19 out of 20 cases of alphabet-diagnoses et al disappear as soon as the pupil or student no longer recieves preferential treatment.
Case A: student expresses behaviour congruent with ADHD and dyslexia. Student is given easier tasks, more time and lower passing bars. Student's symptoms persist.
Case B: as above, but student is given the same tasks, plus extra homework which the parents are to be involved in/with, to make up for any shortfall due to the alleged conditions. Student is given extra time during exams, test and such but is held to the same standard as his/hers classmates. Student's symptoms disappear after a few weeks.
Case C: as B but student's symptoms persist for months and are consistent no matter context or environment. Student is to undergo clinical trials and evaluation by a licensed psychologist, for a period of several weeks. (I'll not tire you with the details of the tests but in a real investigation they are very rigorous, and often repeated by a fellow psychologist who hasn't seen the first results.) Should the tests indicate ADHD, the student and parents are offered extra counseling and training on how to handle it. Medication is not offered.
(Case C is how it used to be done. Ritaline and other amphetamines were never offered until the person in question was over 25 years of age.)
The above pattern is equally true for various personality disorders and neuroses. If the patient is exposed to a "march or die"-mentality and situation (in principle!), almost all become if not happy so at least sane and normal.
Sorry, but this issue is to me like a Kentish coastal hamlet to a viking; just cannot leave it alone.
Your final thought is why it is so important to those who would defy truth and common sense (a man is a man, hands and all) to provide propaganda to young children and to take advantage of generations of schoolchildren who have never read Kipling’s “If” or Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” Orwell’s “Animal Farm” or Jackson’s “The Lottery”. Those of us under the age of 40 or so have been fed the pablum of pro-kindness philosophy and assured that we, unlike the generations before, possess supreme moral proficiency and lack blind spots. No wonder we are a bunch of thugs demanding respect-or-else. I bet there are a lot of people who even in their private moments would never examine what they truly believe because the very concept of coming to a personal belief about the world— of thinking critically, of having a personal moral compass— is as foreign to them as it would be to a poodle. Such things aren’t “kind” and thus are only done by the bullies of the world whom we must name and shame.