David Craig, on October 5th, 2020(Monday/Tuesday blog)
I used to enjoy reading the readers’ comments on the Times website. Most journalists are generalists and so their articles tend to be fairly superficial. But some Times readers were experts in their subjects and so could often add information or insights that went beyond what the journalists knew. Moreover, having researched and written books on the EU, UK government incompetence and waste, charities, Third-World corruption and universities, I sometimes commented as well when I felt I had information that neither journalists nor readers might know.
However, as regular readers will know, I have now been permanently banned from commenting on the Times website. Apparently my views on subjects like the EU, Brexit, charities, Third-World corruption and suchlike are against the Times’s guidelines. Though I suspect I know rather more about such subjects that the Times’s woke, europhiliac, West-loathing, Trump-hating moderators with their useless university degrees in Gender studies or Post-Colonial Guilt Studies or whatever.
But nowadays there seem to be very few Times readers’ comments that are actually informative. Since the Brexit vote, Trump’s election and then Johnson’s election, most comments made by Times readers are based on astonishing levels of ignorance and seem to be full of hate, anger and foam-flecked fury.
Why do they hate Trump so much?
With democratically-elected President Trump having caught the Chinese Covid-19 plague, Times readers’ comments appear to have plunged to a new low point. So, I’d like to deal with just a few of the main points that ignorant, hate-filled, deranged Times readers are screaming about:
Times readers’ hatred – “I hope Trump dies!”
In the thousands of comments about Trump and the virus, I would estimate that around 5% come from readers hoping that Trump dies. One reader wrote “I wish him dead” and another “The world would be a better place without people like Trump”. It truly is extraordinary that supposedly educated Times readers have sunk to such depths of malevolence that they hope the democratically-elected president of Britain’s closest ally dies. It’s even more extraordinary that Times moderators allow such comments.
I know that if any slightly conservative person had written that they hoped Jeremy Corbyn or Joe Biden would die, they would be lambasted across the media and certainly have their career destroyed. But the Times moderators (and editors?) seem to consider that hoping Trump dies is quite acceptable.
Times readers’ ignorance – “Trump is responsible for 200,000 American deaths”
Many Times readers have written that Trump deserves to suffer from Covid-19 as he is responsible for over 200,000 American deaths. As one reader wrote “My sympathies are with the tens of thousands he let die“. As far as I understand, this shows a stunning level of ignorance about US healthcare. Congress and the Senate can pass bills about the type of healthcare in the US such as the Affordable Care Act. But the US is a federal system in which state governors and city mayors are responsible for all actions taken to deal with pandemics like the Coronavirus. These have absolutely nothing to do with the President.
For example, governor Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan has just lost a court case against the lockdown measures she has imposed in her state. And in New York, it is governor Andrew Cuomo (son of former governor Mario Cuomo!) who is responsible for that state having a Chinese plague death rate that is around three times the USA average.
Why don’t Times readers ever check their facts before spewing their pig-ignorant bile? It’s not difficult to open a new tab while commenting in order to Google who is responsible in the US for imposing, or choosing to not impose, lockdown measures. Though clearly this is too complicated for thousands of Times readers.
Times readers’ political bias – “Trump acted too late”
Once people realised how contagious and dangerous the Wuhan flu was, the Democrats and, of course, Democrat-supporting, Trump loathing Times readers have lambasted Trump for doing too little too late. These people seem to have very short memories indeed. They seem to have forgotten that when Trump originally imposed a travel ban on China, Democrats and Times readers howled and screamed that Trump was a “racist“. Democrat-adoring Times readers have also forgotten Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to San Francisco’s Chinatown to encourage people to get out and about and support Chinese businesses:
I wonder how many people caught the Xi Pingpong plague after Pelosi’s press stunt?
Other Democrats such as Biden and Squad stalwart Alexandra Ocasio Cortez accused Trump of trying to create a “fake crisis”. But Trump still took action to try to control the Chinese plague in spite of foam-flecked, mouth-frothing Democrat opposition.
Times readers’ arrogance about their own ‘superior intelligence’
A constant theme in Times readers’ comments is that Trump is stupid. Here’s one of the more polite comments “The only thing in abundance regarding the Trump White House is stupidity. In extremis”. I agree that Trump’s personal style is more than grating and that his need to say something even when he has nothing to say is more than unfortunate. But he is not stupid. He has made and lost and then made a fortune. Yes, he was helped by his father. But many sons of rich men have been given and have wasted fortunes.
He also almost went bankrupt. I believe this was after he invested vast amounts of money in building hotels and casinos in Atlantic City at a time when Los Vegas was the only other place in the USA where gambling was legal. But a few years later, the US changed the law and allowed development of casinos on Indian reservations to help create jobs and this pretty much wrecked Trump’s Atlantic City venture.
But Trump’s achievements are almost incredible. The first time he ever ran for office he was elected US president. Clinton’s unsuccessful campaign ($768 million in spending) outspent Trump’s successful one ($398 million) by nearly 2 to 1. But ingénu Trump managed to understand the American people in a way that Clinton, who had spent her life in politics, utterly failed.
Donald Trump is not stupid. Or at least, certainly not as stupid as most of the cowardly, frustrated, keyboard warriors, usually hiding their real identities behind ridiculous names, who vent their ignorant, hate-filled spleen on the Times website.
Times readers’ conspiracy theories – “It’s fake news'”
And then there are the Times readers conspiracy lunatics. They’re the ones who for over three years have screeched about “Russian collusion” and Trump being “Putin’s puppet”. Fresh from that hoax, they’re now accusing Trump of faking his Coronavirus test results to get sympathy and avoid having to debate with the great Joe Biden. Several thousand Times readers made this claim. Here’s just one of those: “This was a politically motivated false positive test result. Got the attention back on Donnie and a few sympathy votes though, to say nothing of weaselling out of the next debates”. And here’s some more: “I bet he’s laughing like he did when the IRS gave him that fat fraudulent tax refund. Better with Biden”.
I guess I just don’t fit in with the Times readership
Looking at the deranged, hate-filled, fact-free madness of what is now probably the majority of Times readers, I can see why I’ve been banned from commenting:
Category: 
Why? A question with no answers. I gave up with The Times some years ago. A debate with reasoned argument is one thing but insults and nonsense is another entirely. The Times has standards but it does not keep to them. It wasn’t only the comments, it was the lack of balance in their articles. I read The Independent for years before The Times and that slowly went the same way.
This blog attracts like minded people. It seems to be the same with YouTube videos. There is no rational challenge to anything. Tony Heller’s climate videos very rarely have a challenge. It is the same with political videos. I like Douglas Murray, but there is no challenge. We have become polarised.
All I see everywhere is differences of opinion and with no means of resolving differences. Orwell talks about the truth but how do we know what that is? If the facts of an issue are agreed then a rational debate should produce a conclusion we can all accept, but then we come to policies set by government. For example, it seems well established that reducing tax rates increases government income but it means that the richest will increase their income. So some people will support increased taxes even if there is less money as a result. It is a case of hating somebody who is better off through hard work and ability rather than rational ideas being implemented.
Why has this happened at a time when we are supposedly better educated? The universities and media do not want to debate issues that are contrary to an accepted view. I suspect schools are much the same. I am sure this has happened because of social media where anybody can express any opinion and it flashes round the world in an instant. All it needs is idiots to support nonsense and it becomes a fact in hours. It is the equivalent of medieval superstition. We left that behind because of science and now pseudo-science is being used to shut down rational debate.
As I look back on my life, I can make no sense of it, and the madness seems to be increasing. I feel that lack of leadership is the problem. Rather Trump than the alternatives but he is not a leader.
AT nails it: “We have become polarised.”
With friends I have known for many years, politics is now a subject best-avoided. They have swallowed the MSM bollox and now seem incapable of rational discussion – any contentious point tends to produce ad-hominem reactions. It’s very sad. One person I’ve known for over 30 years actually said to me, “Don’t rock the boat, your ideas are making me uncomfortable”. Not making me think, or willing to consider the idea, but hurting my feelings!
I shall attempt to instill in my young grandchildren the ability to think clearly and never just accept but debate all points, but their parents are now a bit too “woke” to reclaim – a lost generation.
Banned from the “Times” that’s nothing.
I got banned from Breibart for suggesting
J K Rowling’s Harry Potter books were a bit boring and although they may have encouraged children to read they also encouraged my bulimia which is why I decided to develop my malady into an art form and get a grant from the Edinburgh Festival.
All was going well until it transpired that I am not black. No grant for me then. I even offered to change my act so that it was only black babies onstage that I threw up over but no dice !
It was even suggested that only throwing up over black babies could be construed as being racist in itself but I pointed out that it could be their one chance to breakthrough into showbusiness. A bit like Diane Abbot in “Gone With The wind”.
I even offered to sprinkle a few Chinese , Arabic, Belgian and Dutch babies into the mix but this suggestion was also rejected as everyone has seen Belgian kids covered in vomit before and my art could be simply written off as plagiarism.
The best way to get back at these censorious periodicals is to pick up a copy at a railway newsagent and gob into the middle pages.
The UK are fruitcakes for Biden. I wish UK had that crook.
YouTube issued a warning to a computer technician who runs a channel for pointing a toy gun at a computer that was very difficult to get working.
I have a feeling that previous generations only appeared to be more intelligent than the woke generations because they were fed an academic and journalistic diet of a much higher order than now. What you eat you are for both food and mental food. So it’s hardly surprising that we have become a nation of fatheads with bodies to match.
In my opinion, Jack Berntein’s analysis gets to the nub of what is going on at the moment.
Below is a quote from his book called: The Life of an American Jew in Racist Marxist Israel (1985). It is available free from several websites. Needless to say, you won’t get a comment through the moderators of the mainstream media quoting from this book.
“Judaism is a religion; ……………………………….” Censored by David Craig
Another book worth reading is Dostoyevsky’s prophetic novel called The Possessed (also called The Devils and Demons. As a classic of world literature, it is available from all of the online book shops.
In my opinion, the people behind the woke culture are possessed devils and demons
Wikipedia: According to Ronald Hingley, it is Dostoevsky’s “greatest onslaught on Nihilism”, and “one of humanity’s most impressive achievements—perhaps even its supreme achievement—in the art of prose fiction.”
Demons is an allegory of the potentially catastrophic consequences of the political and moral nihilism that were becoming prevalent in Russia in the 1860s. A fictional town descends into chaos as it becomes the focal point of an attempted revolution, orchestrated by master conspirator Pyotr Verkhovensky. The mysterious aristocratic figure of Nikolai Stavrogin—Verkhovensky’s counterpart in the moral sphere—dominates the book, exercising an extraordinary influence over the hearts and minds of almost all the other characters. The idealistic, Western-influenced generation of the 1840s, epitomized in the character of Stepan Verkhovensky (who is both Pyotr Verkhovensky’s father and Nikolai Stavrogin’s childhood teacher), are presented as the unconscious progenitors and helpless accomplices of the “demonic” forces that take possession of the town.
What took place in the novel is what actually happened in Russia itself 40 years later.
I read it about 30 years ago, so I will be reading it again.
There is plenty of material on Dostoyevsky on YouTube, including free audiobooks, book reviews, commentary, etc.
Here is some interesting commentary on Dostoyevsky’s The Devils by the late Malcolm Muggeridge.
The telegraph comments used to be good when free and anonymous now its behind a paywall where you can be tracked, monitored and censored.
In fact all mainstream UK media right of centre is like this now. You have the daily fail but the thats just anger click porn idiot troll rag