Anti-terror legislation was not about protecting us from terrorism. The risk of terrorism increased.
Climate policy is not about saving the planet from climate change. Climate policy will make us more vulnerable to weather.
Covid policy is not about protecting us from viruses.
Maybe people have forgotten. But 'terror' was the reason that people were prohibited from doing things in the 2000s. Security guards at forgotten shopping centres were on high alert, jumping on anyone with a camera.
Governments don't like people doing things.
The government emphasised vigilance. Meanwhile, its bombing campaigns created irrepressible anger overseas. And then its successor backed the very same forces in order to secure strategic gains, and unleashed absolute chaos and waves of migration to Europe.
So if you took a photo of your kid eating ice-cream at a Westfield, you were a terror suspect. But meanwhile, the government was hard at work inventing reasons for you to be terrified of other people, summoning those people into existence.
We should question governments' competence, and challenge its stories, motivations and good faith.
Call me a cynic, but I don't believe any of their crises. Which is not to say there were no terrorists, is no global warming and no virus. It is to say that terrorists, global warming and viruses are extremely convenient.
There were no WMDs though.
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Greens have a tendency to oversell themselves as a popular movement.
In reality, they are hostile to the broader population, and only exist as a movement at all by virtue of the generosity of billionaire 'philanthropists'.
And people tire of them.
This was epitomised one morning in Canning Town.
Extinction Rebellion protesters had convinced themselves that their stunt would provoke a popular uprising.
They got dragged off the train and kicked in the head.
People would rather be in a car than on a bike. Even in traffic. Wonks can dream of mountain-fresh air and torrents of 'active' travellers. But it may not be possible to persuade people into that Utopia, which needs at least as much scrutiny as resistance to it does.
What if 'active travel' is not a good thing? What if greater dependence on the motor car is a good thing? What if public transport and walking/cycling are limiting of people's preferences and ambitions, and have no realistic hope of achieving what their advocates claim?
My preference is for the car. I do cycle, sometimes even for leisure. But never if it's raining or cold. But I don't pretend these preferences are the model for all of society.
It's true of "systemic 'racism'" too, that people who claim it is a fact cannot identify the components or dynamics of the 'system'. Yet they are obsessed with 'systems'.
What people who demand the abolition of an (imagined) system invariably are in reality demanding is the instantiation of a system.