Popular Sovereignty Suffers a Thousand Cuts Before it is Ended by Bad-Faith Actors

Spoiler alert: if you read The Guardian, you won’t learn about many abuses (but perhaps that’s intentional)

As this ‘new’ year begins, the propaganda mills continue to spin as wildly as ever. Never late to these kinds of parties, here’s the MI6 mouthpiece The Guardian with some shady disinformation, which, while it’s a disingenuous pile of horse manure, serves to inaugurate this year’s freak-show of the legacy media’s coverage of pandemic ‘politics’.

Apologies to horses, though, for I’d clear your stable rather than read these masterpieces of ‘journalistic excrement’.

Resorting to the common trope of ‘Eastern’ Europe somehow being the area’s poor relation in terms of manners and such, Zala Šeško leads with the time-honoured hypothesis:

Europe’s political approach to the coronavirus pandemic has divided down stark east-west lines, a Guardian analysis has found.

Finally, a piece where I can apply my professional expertise in a manner that’s both meaningful and perhaps even revelatory in the context of all things Covid-19. Let’s go and have some fun reading this piece of agitprop together, shall we?!

First, let’s give credit to whom it is due: who is Zala Šeško, you may ask? Well, according to the Guardian website, she is ‘an interactive journalist on the Guardian Visuals team’ (whatever that means).

My guess is that it means she has a mobile phone, takes pictures, and posts stuff online—yet, it’s actually even more hilariously moronic than my estimate, for Ms. Šeško is, in her own words, a ‘comp[uter science] undergrad finding her place in creative dev[elopment] whilst battling her ceaseless to learn list’, courtesy of her Twitter profile.

To sum up her credentials: Ms. Šeško is an aspiring gfx designer who now writes supposedly ‘serious’ articles for the Guardian, am I correct? Well, if that’s the case, I’d like psychologists to weigh in on the self-perceptual understanding (if that’s indeed the right word) of their editorial staff, but I digress. Let’s return to the piece, shall we?

Given this sad and sorry state of affairs, it’s hardly surprising that Ms. Šeško’s piece is neither original nor consists of (her or The Guardian’s analysis), as the second (!) paragraph shows (my emphases; I kept the links for your perusal):

Five of 18 eastern European countries have registered major violations of international democratic freedoms since March 2020, according to research conducted by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, compared with none of 12 western European countries.

The research also shows that eastern European countries have been more likely to turn to abusive enforcement, disinformation and discriminatory measures, with the most common violation being restrictions on the media.

It’s V-Dem’s research, then, which shows that ‘western Europe countries’ that abrogated civil liberties and individual freedoms aren’t particularly mean to those court reporters masquerading as ‘adversarial journalists’ (whom the same western governments also pay to ensure their publications’ viability in these trying times) who advocate an end to medical freedom, informed consent, and the sovereign individual; as a shorthand, here’s a useful compilation of Canadian PM Trudeau calling out ‘the unclean’ in many different ways.

There’s so much more crap in here, with my (almost) favourite part being this section (same as above):

The worst violations were observed in Serbia, which recorded a violations score three times higher than the European average. Under a special regime implemented in a declared state of emergency, refugees, migrants and asylum seekers were selectively targeted and put under strict 24-hour quarantine, controlled by the military. They were banned from leaving the centres, while support staff were prevented from entering.

Given the absurdities coming out of places such as the Australian ‘National Resilience Center’ and Covidistan’s own nightmarish house of mirrors masquerading as paternalistic intentions towards an ungrateful third of the population, my guess is that Ms. Šeško would be perfectly fine with blanket oppression of dissent and the confinement of individuals based on their ‘infection’ status.

Be that as it may, here’s the summary ‘analysis’ conducted by Ms. Šeško; behold:

Here’s the kicker (same as above):

Dr Joelle Grogan, a senior lecturer in law at Middlesex University, found that experts from 24 out of 27 EU countries reported at least some concern regarding restrictive measures falling outside the legal powers of the government.

However, even if ‘nearly all countries struggle with balancing the rule of law with the intense pressure to act in an emergency’, she said this did not mean we should be equally concerned about all countries.

Now we know—and while this is about as vacuous and moronic as it gets (but, sadly, passes for quite a bit of academic wisdom these days). I trust your instincts and perception of reality to dissect meandering BS such as this above, but I will leave you with a thought experiment to boot: do replace ‘countries’ with ‘people’ and ‘the rule of law’ with ‘face masks’ or ‘vaccines’ and have some ‘fun’ with this nugget of wisdom.

There is a bit more of all of these ‘insights’, including pouring buckets of condescension on ‘the usual suspects’, from Serbia to Poland, and from Slovenia to Hungary, to say nothing about, of course, everyone’s bogeyman Belarus and Russia.

The final segment of that piece has Ms. Šeško quoting Ms. Grogan again, and it reads as follows (as above):

‘The risk of normalising emergency is that ordinary expectations of what rights we can exercise without conditions are forgotten, and what decisions government should only make with permission are ignored: we can say we have a democracy, but not live in one.’

There is hope, however, since [Grogan] argues authoritarianism fundamentally relies on public support. ‘For ordinary people—protest, objection and education [are] the best resistance against anti-democratic trends.’

I’m glad we learned this. I’m also convinced that we could have learned this, too, without Ms. Šeško’s piece, which is heavy on quotations from Ms. Grogan (who, ‘incidentally’, also self-promoted the former’s piece on Twitter, which is a testament—rather: case study—of Twitter’s self-promoting and circular perception bias) and light on actual analysis.

What else could be learned from looking around that piece, by the way?

Let’s Talk about Cognitive Dissonance (and scheming funders, too)

As mentioned above, I left the original links in the quotation, which leads to the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute over at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Deploying equally vacuous language (such as this), which ‘informs’ the reader that it

takes a comprehensive approach to understanding democratization. This approach encompasses multiple core principles: electoral, liberal, majoritarian, consensual, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian. Each Principle is represented by a separate index, and each is regarded as a separate outcome in the proposed study. In this manner we reconceptualize democracy from a single outcome to a set of outcomes.

Now you know. What else is there? Well, ‘V-Dem’ (of simply ‘V’, to its friends) is an affiliate of the Department of Political Science at U Gothenburg and has many good friends—some 3,500 who elect to remain anonymous—and the Kellogg Institute over at the University of Notre Dame in the U.S. While it’s certainly tantalising to enquire about their methods and ideas, I found that the more interesting aspect might be their funding streams.

Under the header ‘Funders’, there’s a whole lot to learn about the powers that are behind this wonderful ‘research’, which include, among others,

• The Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfund

• The Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation

• The EU Commission, as well as the Scandinavian Research Councils

• The Marcus and Marianne Wallenberg, as well as the Mo Ibrahim Foundations

• The Canadian International Development Agency (cue the Trudeau link above)

• The Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos from Portugal

• And George Soros’ Open Society Foundation

Hence, my conclusion: this selective listing tells you much more about the intent of V-Dem’s ‘research’, The Guardian’s ‘analysis’, and the cognitive dissonance that’s taken hold of western elites.

If pieces such as the one above is what passes for ‘serious’ analysis these days, we can rest assured that its readers—western elites—will stumple, trip, and fall over their own (open) shoe-laces by, well, yesteryear. Alas, this piece of garbage is cheap agit-prop unworthy of anyone. So, I read this crap so you don’t have to.

You’re welcome.