Show me the evidence!

Have you ever expressed an opinion or had an argument with someone on social media? Have you ever dared to use your knowledge to debunk somebody’s fragile worldview? I certainly have. Eventually, there comes a point in any of these online discussions when the person on the other side demands proof of your claims.

If you base your views in reality, it’s really hard to argue online. I advise against it all together, but sometimes even I can’t help myself when someone makes outrageous claims. It’s difficult because you start to notice that people are fucking stupid. The source of their stupidity is often ignorance, but still they defend their uneducated opinions like their life depends on it. It often does, metaphorically speaking. People often get attached to their opinions and views so much that they become WHO they are and not just what they believe. If you question their beliefs, you question their egos. That’s why they are almost never willing to change their mind even when presented with clear evidence that they’re wrong. Losing an argument, letting go of an opinion is like losing some part of themselves. That’s why they show signs of discomfort and often get aggressive when their beliefs are doubted by someone. It’s their ego that’s being dismantled not their opinion. We’re all guilty of it, including me. The smartest people in this world hold some kind of beliefs they are not ready to let go of simply because of their attachment to them and because they allowed these beliefs to define who they are. I’ve seen some otherwise intelligent people get swallowed and consumed by one ideology or the other. Many of them are aware of the hypnotizing power of ideologies and “the madness of crowds”, but even they can’t resist this downward pull from the brain hungry zombies. This happens on both left and right and the person can only see their own gullibility and naiveness in hindsight when one day they look back with embarrassment at how easily they were seduced by the slogans.

More often than not, people subscribe to certain beliefs simply because they are held hostage by their ideology. If you’re on the Left, you very likely are a feminist who believes in climate change, that there are more than two genders, that capitalism is evil, and abortion is a human right. If you’re on the Right, you oppose all of these ideas, often relying on religion as your moral compass. You believe in free speech and the right to own a gun, while the left challenges those rights. Both sides clash on the field of battle – Twitter – and are ready to defend their beliefs, which aren’t really their beliefs at all. They are beliefs that are part of the package of the group they have signed up to. Before they know it, they protect ideas they know very little about but feel so deeply connected to that they feel they must defend the honour of their group. They become the righteous warriors who slay dragons and fight evil forces of this world. They are determined to crash the enemy and are fuelled by the support, admiration, likes and retweets from their peers.

I was like this at one point. I remember when I joined a Twitter conversation about abortion. My mostly Right-Wing views (to arms of which I was pushed by the teachings of modern feminism) put me on the autopilot and I assumed the attacking position seeing the other side as my sworn enemies. The enemies in this case were pro-choice activists. At that point I saw the subject of abortion with a black and white filter. I was arguing like I knew the subject deeply even though I had never thought about it much or read anything about it. In other words, before “joining” the Right, I wasn’t that bothered about abortion. When I saw the tweets from pro-choice activists, I had to show them how wrong they were. I had to make sure they knew abortion was never alright. My keyboard was on fire, notifications about how much outrage I caused fed my self-righteous thirst for victory and I didn’t care how many snowflakes I triggered. Every person who disagreed with me, I managed to convince myself, proved me right. I was fighting for the right cause. I was the good guy.

Today, there is more grey area in my views on abortion. In my adopted views there was no room for exceptions. Later, I realised what my true beliefs were, and they’ve remained so to this day. I realise now that I don’t really care about it that much. In my opinion, pro choice people aren’t defending women’s reproductive rights but their rights to not take responsibility for their actions. Pro life activists aren’t fighting for unborn children but for the power of their ideology over others. Understand that I am talking about activists. Not everyone who has an opinion on the matter is an activist. I still think abortion is wrong in most cases, and if people aren’t willing to take responsibility for the consequences of sex, they should either use various forms of anticonception and accept the consequences of them or not have sex at all. I mean, the pill might fuck up your hormones, but at least you’re not killing babies, right? I wish both sides of the debate would be honest in their motivations and admit what they really care about – power and control on the right and being irresponsible and unaccountable on the left.

To sum this section up, if you ever find yourself feeling passionate about a belief system, ask yourself if you truly believe it or if it’s something that’s been forced upon you by your group. You don’t want anyone to be able to predict any of your views based on one or two of your opinions. For example, I am an atheist. Many atheists, especially those in public eye, are hard leftists. They are pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-COVID mandates during the pandemic and many more. If you predicted that I too held these views simply because I don’t believe in God, you’d be wrong. It shows that atheism hasn’t influenced my other views and values. Similarly, if you’re a feminist, you really don’t want me to accurately predict your stance on climate change, gun control and Trump – as these are all completely unrelated to feminism. If your views on the above match those of other feminists then congratulations – your mind has been corrupted by ideology.

Let’s talk about evidence now. As I’ve briefly described above, people have different reasons for believing what they believe and defending those beliefs. As mentioned at the beginning, some people will demand proof of your claims if what you’ve said to them shakes their worldview. They want to see the science. If you can’t produce it, they claim victory even if their own views are formed in their gut and not in a lab. The problem with this type of people is that they aren’t willing to do any heavy lifting (or reading in this case). They want you to give them a quick graph or a short article that proves you right. They don’t realise that the answers lie in thousands of book pages one’s had to go through to come to the conclusions one has come to. There is no single graph or a slide show that can spoon feed these people with information. These people don’t think, they react. Because they themselves often pull their views out of their ass, they think you do too, so you won’t be able to produce any evidence to prove what you’re saying is backed by science.

Let’s say I believed there was a high probability of the existence of intelligent life out there in the Universe. Someone – a deeply religious person perhaps, who believes God created life exclusively on Earth and no more than six thousand years ago, and the rest of the Universe is only for us to ponder and admire – would stand there and say, “Oh yeah, Mulder? Prove it!”. There is of course no way to prove it. But with basic understanding of what conditions need to be met for a planet to host alien life, and knowledge of evolution are, in my opinion, enough to look into the night sky and make an assumption. My “evidence” in this case would consist of at least one book on evolution and one on astronomy. It’s more than you can put in a tweet, and more than most people can handle.

In other words, there is no single proof for anything. Can I prove that God doesn’t exist? No, but I can tell you all about the human nature, our superstitious tendencies and thousands of gods that have been worshipped and forgotten throughout history, to show you that all gods are most likely invention of man to explain the unknown and cope with mortality. It doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist, but it shows that he probably doesn’t. I used to mock religious people, but as I got older, I’ve come to understand the value of religion and that, as long as it stays out of my bedroom or doesn’t fly planes into sky scrapers, it’s mostly harmless and it actually makes people happy. I used to attend a church service every Sunday for six months only to expose these people to the truth, but what I saw was probably the happiest bunch I have ever seen.

People will want proof, but they will not change their mind, because their belief system wasn’t built with evidence. It was handed to them by the group. The only proof they ever needed was how it made them feel. Unfortunately, you can’t convince feelings with reason. Feelings can often override reason, though. The bottom line is this – don’t argue online, form your own opinions, question the beliefs of your ingroup and educate yourself of what matters to you. Read books, listen to podcasts and live a life of meaning. Social media algorithms are out there to trigger you. That’s how they steal your time and attention. Don’t let them. You’re not changing anyone’s mind and you’re not making your life better. I was once arguing with someone on Instagram, eventually I clicked on their profile. It turned out to be a 17-year-old girl. I was twice her age. Twice her experiences and accumulated knowledge. There was no way I was opening her mind. You never know who the other person is, but it’s pretty dumb to argue with kids online. You’re on different levels and as an adult, you have the responsibility to be wiser and to set an example. We often forget that the avatar we see is another human being and allow ourselves to get carried away. We make assumptions about the person’s character and their morality. Social media brings the worst out of us and these online debates expose that. Don’t get triggered. Move on. You’ll be happier for it.

Why women can’t get away with sleeping around

Social Media algorithms are interesting. After seeing a handful of “red pill” clips and videos on both You Tube and Instagram, this content is almost all they recommend to me. The videos range from podcast episodes to street interviews, and they typically revolve around male-female dynamics and dating. The topic that is discussed the most often is whether a high number of sexual partners is a red flag.

The conversation usually gets heated when it is considered a red flag in women but not in men. It is almost impossible to have a civilised conversation in the comment sections of these videos. So, I have decided to explore this double standard myself. I will give you an answer to why women can’t get away with promiscuity in today’s society and why it’s not the same for men. I will also give you my opinion on the whole thing and whether there is a way we can all get along.

To explain the double standard, I will rely on psychology, dating preferences, our evolved nature and behaviour and social norms and pressures. I will use a couple of examples to argue my points. They will range from scientific studies, celebrity dating to my personal experience and observations over the years I spent on an adult dating site where people meet for sex. It’s a long read, but I feel like it’s needed in order to explore the subject fully.

The modern world is full of double standards. Some of them hurt men and some of them hurt women. These double standards punish one gender for certain behaviours while rewarding or remaining indifferent towards the other. Men can’t still live at home after a certain age without being judged and women, as it turns out, can’t sleep around without consequences. Some might say it shouldn’t be that way, but we don’t live in a world of should and shouldn’t. We live in an unfair world of what is and isn’t.

A man wants to be her woman’s first and a woman wants to be her man’s last

This saying attempts to romanticise a woman’s approach to a long-term relationship (LTR) and to demonise men’s search for innocence and purity. It also highlights how both sexes feel about past sexual partners. Men, on average, prefer to settle down with a woman who doesn’t have a reputation of a “hoe” and women, on average again, are not that bothered about the man’s past. The double standard exists partly because women don’t care enough to pressure men to be more selective and keep it in their pants. While women as a whole and as individuals may not necessarily prefer men who have had many sexual partners, they definitely don’t discriminate against them as much as men do against women with similar experiences.

The Dicaprio Paradox

This difference becomes even more pronounced when the man is a celebrity and known for his promiscuity. Women still pursue this man hoping he will see their value and change his ways and pops the question. Leonardo DiCaprio is a perfect example. Everyone knows he likes to date models in their early 20s. His relationships don’t last very long, and he has had many girlfriends or casual partners since his rise to fame. His reputation does not stop models and young women from getting into relationships with him. Every new girlfriend surely must know she is not becoming Mrs. DiCaprio, so why even bother? The answer partially lies in what I said earlier – every woman thinks she is special and can change any man.

The other side of the coin is the fact that women want men other women want. It is an undeniable fact and one that women will not admit to, and many are probably not aware of. This is well observed, and it doesn’t take a Hollywood celebrity to witness it as it happens in the realm of mortals too. On average, women aren’t concerned about man’s promiscuity because it signals that many women are attracted to him and that he can provide for and satisfy them in more ways than one. Having been with multiple women also signals confidence which means competence, both of which are traits women find attractive.

It is different for men, who know how difficult it is to get in a woman’s pants, so they don’t respect a woman who has made it  easy for multiple men. A man who surrounds himself with attractive women, even if they are just friends, is also more interesting to women than a man with no female friends. A woman with many male friends is less attractive to men. This is possibly because men are aware of each other’s intentions and don’t want to get involved with a woman who keeps around guys who are sexually interested in her. Yes – men are jealous, territorial and competitive just like males of other mammals. Not much can be done by complaining about it.

The difference between male and female dating preferences and promiscuity comes out perfectly when men and women are rich and famous. Above, we focused on Leonardo DiCaprio’s preference for short term flings with young and attractive women who know they will be disposed of before they expire on their next birthday. Ricky Gervais even joked that by the time a 4-hour movie ends, DiCaprio’s date will be too old for him.

Similar thing happens with famous musicians or athletes. It’s well known they have attractive women lining up to sleep with them. From rockstars to rappers and NBA players, young women are desperate to use their looks as bait to lure these high performers into bed. They know that nothing will become of it, so they do it for attention, status, and let’s not forget some do it in hopes of getting pregnant or to spread false accusations of assault hoping for a quick payday – all of which are female strategies to gain status and access to men’s resources. Sometimes, when they don’t get what they want from a celebrity (relationship or commitment), they may accuse him of sexual assault as a form of revenge. Revenge for being rejected. There are of course genuine accusations, but we’d have to live in a fairy land to think that false accusations are not the norm. There are genuine victims of influential men, but this is not the focus of this discussion.

Nothing comes even close to it when roles are reversed. Female celebrities don’t have men lined up to sleep with them. They don’t use their power, fame and influence to pick average guys from their Instagram followers to have sex with them. Even the most outrageous, rude and dirty minded female artists you can think of do not have a harem of men at their disposal. We can sit here all day and argue whether it is because of social pressures, men being intimidated by female celebrities or because fucking a new fan every week is not what most famous women want to do. My guess is that Rihanna doesn’t want to go on a date with a guy just because he is twenty-five and has a big dick. You’re welcome to tell me I’m wrong.

Strategies to compete for quality mates

We could speculate that the double standard in question would largely disappear if women (who pull the strings on the mating market) put more value on men’s selectiveness and sexual purity. Men’s dating strategy would change to reflect female preferences and they’d stop searching for meaningless one-night stands and they would focus on offering women what they want. There is only one question: Do women really want every player and bad boy to disappear and be replaced by Mr. Nice Guy?

Chad and Tyrone – the 10% of men who sleep with 80% of women

The key that opens many locks is a master key; the lock that can be opened by many keys is broken

When women hear it, they usually get offended, but is there some wisdom in this phrase?

Women are the gatekeepers to sex, meaning they control access to sex. Without their consent, men aren’t getting any. It is also true that pretty much any woman could have sex with a stranger or a friend within the next 30 minutes if she wanted to. All she has to do is respond to a couple of DMs on Instagram or Tinder.

It’s not the same for men, who are the gatekeepers to commitment and marriage. It is men who have to choose to get married. Men are the prize in a relationship. Sex is what men want, therefore women control access to it, it is their resource as we established earlier. They use it to get what they want from any man. I’m not saying they’re exchanging sex for favours. They’re exchanging the possibility of sex by flirting with a man to get what they want. Men don’t need much to think a woman might want to sleep with them. That’s why it’s easy for women to manipulate men. This form of manipulation can happen in the workplace, nightclub or even a shop and interactions don’t have to last longer than a few seconds. I hate to break it to women, but if you so much as flick your hair or touch a man’s shoulder while asking him if you could get ahead of him in a queue, he will think you want him, and he will do anything for you. What is even more curious about it is that by expressing your interest in him, he automatically finds you more attractive. Women are aware of the power of their body language and use it all the time, sometimes subconsciously and whether they are single or not.

Commitment is what women want, therefore it’s what men bargain with. They can’t use it as a weapon as cleverly as women use sex, but, if they are high-value men, they can withhold commitment and only give it to special women, making all potential partners work extra hard for their attention. Consider a serial womaniser Leonardo DiCaprio again. He uses the possibility of commitment to lure attractive young women into his wealthy kingdom. His commitment is what young women compete for, so they use flirting, body language and sex to win the competition. Even if they want to be with him for the lifestyle he provides, this lifestyle and wealth are worthless without his commitment, so it’s the commitment that is more valuable than money and fame.

90% of single men would have to try very hard to have sex with a newly met woman in the next month, let alone in the next half an hour. 10%, so called Chads and Tyrones of the world (tall, dark and handsome), will have sex more often but they still have to work harder than most, if not all, average looking women. One study showed that when a man approached random women on the street and asked them if they would have sex with him, 0% said yes. When the same experiment was performed on random men, this time with a woman asking the question, a significant percentage of these guys were ready to go. The remaining few who refused either apologised to her or asked for a rain check. It’s interesting that many men felt the need to apologise for rejecting the woman or felt guilty about refusing her offer.

This research suggests that, given the chance, men are naturally more willing to sleep with a stranger than women are. What it also tells us is that there probably isn’t that many women who sleep around, but those that do don’t have to work for it. The number of men who sleep around is also very low, but they still have to work for it by showing confidence, charisma, sense of humour and being able to “woo” multiple women – a hard task, indeed. Out of the men who don’t sleep around, majority of them probably would if given options but they can’t compete with the 10% of Chads and Tyrones who are wanted and desired by 90% of women.

In other words, men have to be funny, confident, charming, well dressed, tall and handsome to have sex. All women have to do is ask.

The adult dating site – who benefits from women’s promiscuity?

The short answer is men. Given a choice, men prefer easy access to low-cost sex with a variety of partners. If we go back to the mating strategy study on college campuses we can see it in broad daylight. Where women had to compete for a small number of quality men, they were willing to have more casual sex because men, on average, are more likely to enjoy casual sex. It was, therefore, men who benefited from this arrangement. Women had to, whether willingly or subconsciously, sacrifice their values or beliefs about sex if they wanted to secure a quality partner. We can conclude, then, that it is men who benefit from female promiscuity.

A common argument to this that women can enjoy sex as much as men do. Yes, they can, but do they enjoy it with strangers as much as men do? They can, if they are prepared to forget about their standards and sleep with anybody and everybody. But are they? The reason men get away with being sluts is that opportunities for sex don’t just come knocking on their door. Even if a man slept with every woman who was interested in sleeping with him, it would still add up to just a handful of women over a long period of time. It is a given that a man would take almost every chance to have sex, but like I said, he’ll be lucky to find more than one woman a month. What if a woman said she was willing to fuck any guy who asks for it? She’d have hundreds of DMs on her Instagram including from guys who live a hundred miles away. Fucking everything that moves does not mean the same for men and for women.

I’ve spent a number of years on an adult dating site. It’s not something to brag about, but my experience definitely illustrates the fact that, on average, men will enjoy sex with complete strangers more than women – even on a dating site where casual sex is the goal of everyone on it. The site also proves that even if a man is willing to have sex with any woman, he will still struggle to get any meets.

Sites like this always suffer from a surplus of men, therefore it is women who set the rules of dating. They get to be pickier and, just like in the real world, 80% of men struggle to get any responses to their messages while 80% of women sleep with 20% of men who are tall, gym fit and have big dicks. Women on this particular site get to be very demanding because they know they can have any guy, so they only want the best of the best. The paradox is that, because of the often extremely low standards of men, even the obese and unattractive women think they get to have demands and deserve Chad or Tyrone. They get hundreds of messages which boost their egos and their self-perception. Now, they think they are in high demand and more attractive than they really are, when, in reality, men just send hundreds of messages a day, hoping for a single reply. They will swallow their pride later.  I’ve been there myself and from talking to women, I know this to be the experience of most men.

Women on the site write extensively about themselves, what they look for in their casual partner and they require that he writes equally as much about himself in his bio. This happens because women don’t understand how men think, and men just want to keep their profiles short and to the point. Men, of course, don’t understand women, that’s why they fail to give them what they want, which in this case is a profile that gives women all the details they need to decide if they want to sleep with them. I’ve seen women who don’t want to hear from men who are below 6ft, 8inches, who aren’t professionals, don’t live alone, don’t drive, don’t have any previous meet verifications from other members. The list of preferences and requirements goes on. Many women on the site don’t even want to meet a man who is a “Tory”.

Men, on the other hand, don’t care what job she does or if she drives. Men don’t care if her profile is blank and, quite frankly, too many verifications are a turn off. This reflects another study on casual and long-term dating, which tells us that women’s preferences and standards remain largely the same when looking for a casual partner as when looking for a long-term relationship. The same study shows us that men lower their standards significantly when looking for casual sex. For women to have sex like men they would have to behave like men, have low standards like men and sleep with whoever is on offer. To put it simply, if men received a hundred sex offers a week, they’d have sex every day. Women do receive hundreds of offers a week and they reject the majority of them.  The picture that’s beginning to paint is that even when all boundaries and judgements are removed, women don’t want to have casual sex the same as men. Instead, they choose to fuck only the type of men they wouldn’t be embarrassed to introduce to their friends and family.

Women are more likely to meet exclusively men of the same age or older while men are more likely to be more flexible while having preference for women in early 20s. Men are more likely to send dick pics even though the majority of women find them repulsive. This happens because men forget that women don’t think like them. Men like to receive nudes and pussy pics because they turn them on, especially if they’ve been taken for them. Women almost never ask for dick pics even if a big dick is their preference. They always want to see a face before any interaction. Women who are obese are more likely to shame men for their preferences by referring to slim and in shape women as bags of bones while men understand (because of being rejected 100s of times) that if they’re fat, they’re not attractive to most women. Most women I’ve seen on the site fantasise about some version of a powerful, mysterious or strong man taking control of them. It goes without saying that this type of man has to have sexual experience, so even though women complain about the double standard, they still prefer a man who knows what he is doing while men don’t really care that much.

Women on the site almost always require a coffee or a drink first to see if things can be taken further, and they almost exclusively look for one friend with benefits as opposed to multiple one offs. Women are also more likely to require men to put more effort into their first messages instead of just saying “hi”. This entitlement to be “woo-ed” in a single message comes from another gender misunderstanding. For men, most of their messages go unread because women are flooded with hundreds of messages a day. Sure, women are bored of seeing the same old “hi, how are you?”, but they fail to understand that whether men put effort in their messages or not, most of the time they get unread or rejected. Men have to spend a lot more time and effort to meet somebody, so sending a quick message without personalising it too much is the best, time-efficient way of achieving that goal. It does create a conflict between the sexes because nobody gets what they want. Women want a personalised message from every man, not realising that men’s experience and high rejection rate discourage treating women as individuals. On a sex site, men don’t care what women write about themselves as long as they have some pictures. Sometimes even they aren’t needed for a man to jump into Uber if it guarantees sex. Reading through detailed paragraphs only to personalise a message is a waste of time for men. More and more women hide special words, such as “princess”, “lollipop” or “cupcake” in their profiles requiring men to use them in the titles of their messages as proof they’ve read their profile. So a man is supposed to read through paragraphs of her preferences and likes, then compose an original message that’s longer than a couple of lines, fun, but not creepy and then get rejected anyway. Much better to just say “hi” to ten different profiles and hope for the best. This female entitlement to being treated special creates male laziness which in turn creates bitterness on both sides. Or perhaps it is the male laziness that creates female entitlement which then creates bitterness?   

As you can see, even on a sex site, where women are sexually liberated, and promiscuity is celebrated they still operate in their default settings and search for quality over quantity.  Men, on the other hand, do exactly what you’d expect of them. They pretend they too want a friend with benefits while actively pursuing multiple women hoping to have as many one offs as possible.  Women’s likes and dislikes are set in stone, while men’s are more flexible depending on who they’re talking to. That’s why women’s profiles are filled with preferences that exclude the majority of men and men’s profiles tend to be short and inviting so they don’t miss out on any woman who might be interested in them.

This mating behaviour of both genders, on a site where sex is the goal of every interaction, where all social pressures and taboos have been removed begs the following questions: Is the double standard a social construct or is it reinforced by our respective natures? Why does there appear to be a self-imposed double standard where women will only have sex with men who’ve previously had sex with someone else? Why do they seek a promiscuous partner while wanting exclusivity and a friend with benefits arrangement?

What needs to happen for a man to enjoy sex with a stranger? Apart from hygiene and at least minimal level of attraction, not much. A man will enjoy sex if it lasts ten minutes or two minutes. He will enjoy it if the girl just lays there not knowing what to do or if she fucks him like a porn star. It is no secret, however, that if a woman offers herself to a man, he better make her cum. It is fair to say then, that sex is hard work for men. It doesn’t take much for a man to have an orgasm. Every man will respond to the same tricks. Not all women are the same, though. What works on one, will be a waste of time with another. There is a research that suggests that women are less likely to cum in a casual hook-up than they are in a committed relationship. Some even go as far as saying the chance of an orgasm in a one-night stand is as low as 10%. It makes sense, if you think about it. A partner that knows what turns you on, when to go faster and when to slow down, when to be gentle and when to be rough, where to kiss and where to bite is way more likely to give her pleasure than someone who might have fucked a lot of women, but has no idea how to please a single one.

If a woman has five one-night stands, she might not have an orgasm once because none of the guys know what to do with her. Some of these guys might be completely inexperienced or too drunk to last long enough. They can be too nervous or too excited to satisfy her. After such encounters, where men enjoy themselves, she feels used and she regrets her decisions. Some might argue that she can guide every man and tell him what she likes so she actually enjoys every hook up. I don’t buy that. From my experience on the site, women don’t want to be reading instructions to men who are on top of them. They want the man to man-handle them and throw them around and this takes a man who is confident and knows what he is doing. No matter what someone might say, no woman wants a man who constantly asks if what he is doing “feels ok”.

Because women are more likely to have disappointing sex, even with men they find attractive, who tick many of their boxes, they are, in my opinion, less likely than men to enjoy sex with complete strangers. They might brush it off, put on a brave face and pretend it doesn’t matter, but it does, and they know it. The website exposes it. Women on it want quality over quantity because they do not want to have a string of disappointing and soul-destroying encounters. Another reason for that is security. Meeting a new man every week is a risk. It’s much safer to have one or two trusted partners and meet them regularly.

Having multiple partners comes with another risk – sexually transmitted diseases. I’ve heard on a podcast, where an expert in the field was interviewed, that women are more likely to get STDs than men. Potentially because female sexual organs are located inside where it’s easier for all this bacteria to thrive.  This is a risk to women, but it could also explain why men are repulsed by a woman who has slept with a lot of men. Evolutionary speaking, our ancestral males valued purity as it ensured paternity, but also because, without sophisticated modern medicine and testing, it helped them exclude females with an STD. Over thousands of generations, males have passed on this preference to their sons so that in the modern-day men have to make a conscious choice to look the other way if a woman they’re interested in is known for her promiscuity. The same evolutionary explanation applies to women valuing quality over quantity. Thousands of generations of females evolved a behaviour to avoid sexually transmitted diseases and other dangers that came from sleeping with a different man every week (partner jealousy and aggression). Males evolved disgust to override their sexual desires and females evolved caution to avoid STDs and physical harm, as well as getting pregnant with a male who is not willing to protect and provide for her and her child. Various forms of anticonception remove many of these risk, but our evolved mechanisms can’t just be turned off. It’s the same as for wild animals that are born and kept in captivity. Their evolved instincts are still there and if released into the wild, those instincts come back online.

Another theory why there is a double standard and that most of slut-shaming is done by other women is quite interesting as well. I believe I read it in The Evolution of Desire, by David M. Buss. He states that women slut shame other women because promiscuous women not only are more likely to take all the good men by making no commitment sex available to them, but also make boyfriends and husbands cheat and leave. Again, sex is women’s weapon. Men can’t use sex in any way other than rape, but this is a whole other subject.  Not all women use their weapon and that is why promiscuous women are a threat to them. They want good men, but even good men will often choose easy access to sex with a variety of partners than a committed relationship. Married men will too be more tempted if there is an opportunity and low chances of getting caught.

What interests me is that male and female sexual behaviour exposes what both really want, and it seems to be natural. In my opinion, society always follows biology and tries (subconsciously) to reinforce it. What I mean by that is that we behave according to our evolved nature and society reinforces that behaviour by rewarding certain aspects of it and punishing other ones. Rewards and punishments come in form of social status. Nobody is in control of it. Our ranking just goes up or down depending on decisions we make. In context of promiscuity, men’s status goes up, although it doesn’t do so indefinitely (although men who have the options to be promiscuous usually are higher in the hierarchy already), while women’s goes down. It happens naturally and both men and women play the game by these rules, whether they like it or not.

The grey matters

It’s not all black and white. Quite a few men online say they don’t care about their woman’s past. I believe we can split these guys into four categories:

  1. Those who genuinely don’t care
  2. Those who care but it’s not a deal breaker for them
  3. Those who care and it is a deal breaker
  4. Those who care but are lying.

The red pill community gets this one thing wrong. They convince themselves that most men are in group three. They believe that most men, as soon as they find out about a woman’s past promiscuity, they call it a day. I think there is nothing further from the truth. I think most men are split between categories two and four.

Group two is the dominant group. These men would prefer if the woman they’re dating didn’t have that past, but they don’t judge them. They wouldn’t choose another woman based on this criteria alone. They don’t think about their partner’s past all the time or with rage and jealousy or they completely overlook it because of their partner’s personality and looks. The red pill gurus would call these men Simps, but that is the majority of men they’re talking about.

Group four lie about their preference for a woman with a low body count because it scores them some brownie points with the ladies. It is simply their dating strategy whereby lying about their preference, they make themselves sexually available to a wider pool of women. In other words, they don’t want to settle down with a promiscuous woman, but they will fake their commitment only to sleep with her. Women can fake orgasms, but men can fake entire relationships. I’ve seen street interviews on social media, where men were asked if body count mattered and those who said that it didn’t received a lot of praise from women in the comment section. Brownie points (and friend zone).

Another grey area is that when a sample of men were asked to choose between a woman who’s slept with, say, at least twenty men and a woman who’s slept with five, but two of them were known to them. They unanimously answered that they would prefer the woman with a higher body count, where they didn’t know any of the men. As a man, I can relate to that. I think it’s within men’s unwritten code that we don’t date our friends’ exes. There is just something wrong about it. I would go as far as say that men are repulsed by the idea of putting their dicks the same place as their friend has had theirs.

Finally, the modern dating scene allows, for the first time in history, for people from different cultures to meet. If you live in a place like London, the options are endless. Men and women come here from all over and they leave their reputations back in their home countries. An Englishman might date a Romanian girl and never find out about her past promiscuity or ex boyfriends.

There is only one problem. Even though a bad reputation doesn’t follow her to the UK and her exes don’t haunt her, the woman’s trauma from the past does. Let me explain. A woman who’s been pumped and dumped too many times, will be, probably rightfully so, more distrusting and judgmental towards men. She will have baggage, in other words. She has been cheated on. Maybe she cheated. She might have had an abortion and can’t stop thinking about. This might cause her to be desperate for a child or to deny fatherhood to her man because she worries he will leave her. One of her exes might have committed suicide and it’s left a permanent mark on her mind.  This is only a few examples of what type of baggage she will be bringing into a man’s life even if he doesn’t know how many boyfriends she’s had before him. This type of baggage can ruing any relationship. It’s almost like dating a man who used to have a gambling addiction and even though he doesn’t gamble anymore, he has accumulated a lot of debt, messed with the wrong guys and he has to pay them back every month for the next ten years. Or it could be like dating a man with a low credit score due to ignoring his multiple credit card bills. He might have a good job now, but his low score might prevent you to buy a new car or get a mortgage.

Men don’t usually bring this kind of trauma into a new relationship. Firstly, because men are used to being rejected but also because after a painful break up, it takes a long time for them to heal, and they often come out as better men at the end of it because they decide to turn their life around. It doesn’t always happen, and some men never move on. Another reason why a string of one-night stands doesn’t break men is that men don’t look at it with shame. Whether it’s right or wrong, men think of the women they have slept with as trophies. There is a reason why “the walk of shame” usually refers to women walking home from a sexual encounter with a guy they’ve just met. Women will, more often than men, feel used after such encounter, especially if it was disappointing. Most men don’t have sex whenever they want but whenever they can.

Past relationships and hook-ups also carry with them another danger. Sexually transmitted diseases.  As mentioned earlier, if females are more likely than males to get infected, it makes sense that, over thousands of generations, males have evolved a preference for females with less sexual partners. When choosing partners, we avoid sick people in general so, from an evolutionary standpoint, there is no reason why people with STDs would be different.

Ensuring paternity is probably the biggest reason why men try to avoid promiscuous women. At least historically and evolutionary speaking. Even in the modern day, when DNA testing is widely available, many men unknowingly raise children which are not biologically theirs. Preferring purity in a partner has been the best way to ensure paternity for men throughout history. I believe this to be an evolved preference or mechanism because being put off by a potential long term partner’s past promiscuity is something men do subconsciously and not by choice. They evolved this over generations to solve the problem in the absence of modern science. In other words, men don’t judge women’s past and think, “I best avoid this type of girl, because I may end up raising another man’s kid”. Rather, just like hunger encourages us to seek food so we don’t have to constantly remind ourselves consciously about eating (we’d starve to death if we had to remember to eat), disgust reminds us to avoid other things, such us poisonous foods, sexual relations with sick people or in this case, women potentially carrying an STD or potentially pregnant with someone else’s child. Men still have the free will to act on or ignore these triggers and in many cases they ignore them. Our brain constantly tries to trick us with strong feelings to motivate us to do things that are beneficial for our survival and wellbeing and the survival of our genes is no different.

There are also studies which suggest that women who have had multiple relationships and one-night stands are less satisfied in their current long-term relationship. In the end, this contributes to higher divorce rates and break ups. There are other factors which play a significant role, in my opinion. Dating apps and social media expose both men and women to endless options which in turn makes them see their partner as just that – an option.

Why do men care and why do women care that men care?

So far, I have explained at length why men might care about body count. My belief is that it is an ancient, biological force driving men to care about it and make them justify it to fit their modern reasoning. A man might explain his preference by saying, “I just prefer a woman with less partners”, or even, “I don’t want to risk catching anything”, but this is just his modern reasoning trying to explain ancient feelings that are hard wired into his brain.

When you look at social media posts, you see plenty of women offended by this. They call men insecure and completely disregard their preference and standards. I believe there are a few reasons for it.

As women approach their thirties they become more aware of the passing time and their youth fading away. Biological clock is ticking and if they haven’t got a long-term partner or children by that time, they start getting worried that they’ve left it too late. More often than not, they think the source of their misery is “lack of good men”, but the reality is good men have always been there, but often invisible to women who just wanted to have fun and live a little before settling down with a “good man”. What they find is that Mr Right was a myth, prince charming never comes, and what remains is left over men and the good men who have their shit together have families now or are happy as they are and don’t want anyone to ruin their peace. They may also prefer slightly younger women.

Like with men, I believe this bitterness is just a manifestation of an evolved fear of the ticking of the biological clock. In this case, women who have slept around through their twenties or had a bunch of failed relationships hate being judged on that because they can’t turn back time. They rationalise their negative feelings by saying it’s unfair that men don’t face the same judgement as they approach their thirties and forties. They are hurt that their one-night stands will haunt them forever and, along with fading youthfulness and looks, reduce their mate value on the dating market while men’s value increases with age and peaks in their thirties. This “inequality” happens because men’s value is judged based on their success, assets, experience and profession. Women’s value is dictated by their fertility which is advertised by youthfulness and attractiveness. These peak in early to mid-twenties. That’s why men find younger women, particularly twenty-two-year-olds, more attractive (there is a study on that) and this is why women usually prefer men slightly older. The heart wants what the heart wants, I guess.

To summarise, women think it’s unfair that men’s value increases and theirs decreases with age and sexual experiences. Not much can be done about it unless women are willing to change what type of guys they like. Almost everything men do is to impress women. If women change what they want, men change what they do.  Across species, it is the females who dictate which males pass on their genes. It is female preferences and standards that make males “show off” their traits. In birds it will be the male who built the nicest nest or a peacock with the most impressive tail. It will be the male frog who calls louder than other males, a male insect that offers the largest meal and so on. Across the animal kingdom, including humans, males show off and risk their lives only to impress females and get laid. It is female preferences that make males sing in the middle of a jungle signalling their location to predators. It is female preferences that make men buy expensive cars or build big shoulders in the gym and it is the male preference that motivates women to hold on to their youthfulness for as long as they can and by any means, from make-up to plastic surgeries.

We all lie and deceive each other to get something from one another. Men lie to get sex. Women lie to get commitment from the man they want. Men lie verbally and tell women what they want to hear and often pretend they are something they’re not. I once heard a story about a guy who was in a nightclub with his friends. His strategy to take a girl home was simple. One of his friend’s job was to pretend he was a football player and played for the local club which was in Championship at the time. A girl next to them got interested and he took her home. Little did she know, he was just a postman.

Women lie differently. They lie about their age, their hair colour, their wrinkles and firmness of their tits and ass. They do it by using beauty products and clothing. I won’t get into the psychological reasons why women wear make-up, but if you’re thinking it’s just to feel pretty, it’s just your ancient brain playing tricks on you to get you to do what it wants. It makes looking good feel nice, so you do what needs to be done to attract mates.

Lying is part of the dating game. If women can lie about their hair colour or natural size of their lips or breasts, then men can pretend they are famous athletes for a night. Preferences are biological and cultural. Their importance varies from individual to individual, but just as most women like guys taller than them, men like women who slept with less partners than them. Not much can be done about it but to embrace our differences, understand them to increase our odds in the dating pool. Realise what the other sex wants and you will find a partner you want, not the partner you can.

One last thought

What if there isn’t a double standard? Women who find offence in the thinking I’ve presented here often say something along the lines of:

“If men can sleep around then so can we!”

“If my partner cares about my body count, he must keep himself to the same standard!”

This reasoning feeds into what I said earlier – 10% of men sleep with 80% of women. This means that the majority of women are interested in fraction of men and then proceed to generalise and assume all men are the same. The reality is that the bottom 50% of men in their twenties are invisible to women. Their experience is completely different to that of the top 10 – 20% of men and a hundred times different to the experience of the majority of women. In other words, 10-20% of men are fucking 80% of women. Those women then go on TikTok and complain about being pumped and dumped all the time and that all men want the same while completely ignoring the fact that the majority of male population is completely invisible to them. This fucked up situation leads women to believe that “if men can do it, so can we”. The problem is, most men don’t do it. They are rejected by all women before they even step out of the house because women’s standards are high and often unrealistic. So, if most women’s experience is that guys are assholes who just want sex, then most men’s experience is that women are only interested in assholes. If women keep choosing the top 20% of men (guys who have options), their experience will reflect that. There is nothing wrong in wanting a top quality mate, it is a sexual preference, but we must realise that on this ruthless dating market, where seduction is seasoned with deception, this preference often leads to heartbreak, unanswered text messages, unwanted pregnancies and bitterness in both sexes.

Leave a comment below and let’s talk about it.

Don’t end up alone

I took my pregnant wife into A&E yesterday. She was having very intense back and abdominal pains and sickness, all of which, according to Dr Google, could be symptoms of miscarriage. We were seen by a nurse right away, but I suppose they weren’t as concerned as us because after the initial verbal examination, they took their sweet time and we spent most of the time sitting in the waiting area. Luckily, the baby was OK, so it is not a post about that. It is about what the waiting area made me realise as sick people were wheeled in.

Across from us sat a young girl. She was no older than twenty years old, although my wife reckoned she was as young as seventeen. She had arrived there a little before us, around 10am. Her hair was blonde, but you could tell it wasn’t her natural colour. She had piercings in her nose. She was very skinny. Not like “unhealthy skinny” but just very thin. I guess you don’t see that very often anymore. She was wearing slippers, blue pyjama bottoms and a black winter coat. She was always in and out of her chair, going either to the toilet or to ask the nurses when she would be seen.

Meanwhile, the door of the department kept swinging open, bringing in new patients or just taking someone through to a different area. Men and women in green ambulance uniforms were standing around with not much to do, probably waiting for the emergency call. They talked about local gyms, broken laptops and mini golf – things colleagues talk about at work. I don’t know what I was expecting, but perhaps I thought staff in the emergency unit would always be armed with seriousness. Instead, they joked around, some even flirted with each other, and they made weekend plans. I’m not blaming them. I’m just painting the picture.

Many people came and went, but the blonde girl and us seemed to be the only ones always going back to the waiting area.

Around 12.30pm, the girl made a phone call. She sat in the corner, her slim body folded in a way she would fit her both feet on the chair. She was talking to her friend. She made the point to be loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to make it obvious. There was a lot of swearing and complaining about not having been seen and about “staff just standing around doing nothing”. From her conversation you could gather two things. One, that she was pregnant and it was still early stages. Two, that her boyfriend, Zac, ignored all of her fifty calls and messages. She had messaged him on all of his social media and at some point her calls went straight to his voicemail. Her pyjamas also suggested that whatever had brought her there was urgent and scared her. None of it excuses her bad manners on the phone, but you couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for her.

On the other side of the room, in the corridor was an older man on the stretcher. I’m not very good with ages so I will assume he was in his seventies or eighties. Grandad age. By his side stood his wife. There were plenty of seats next to us, but she stood there next to him. There is not much to say about that couple, but they represent something that a lot of young people will miss out on (and are missing out on already).

I will make a lot of assumptions here, but the manner with which the blonde girl spoke on the phone, swearing and complaining about staff in their close proximity, her piercings and the way she carried herself suggested to me that she brought it all on herself. Her excuse of a boyfriend turned off his phone or blocked her number and didn’t wanna know. I judged that this is the type of guys or boys she goes for. So called fuckboys.

Why is this a problem? It is a problem for young people, especially for women. The female empowerment movement sells young women a lie. A lie that they can have a string of meaningless relationships or hook-ups or that they don’t need men at all. It tells them that they can wait to settle down and as a result they spend their twenties getting pumped and dumped by guys like Zac. By the time they “are ready to settle down”, usually when they approach thirty or thirty-five, they come to a sad realisation – there is no good men left. Never mind that they start blaming all men for there not being any good one. The fact of the matter is that the good ones were invisible to them for a decade of their life and they eventually found someone to settle down with themselves.

I promise I’m getting somewhere with this. The longer you wait to find someone, the more flings, hook-ups and relationships you have before meeting someone for a serious relationship, the less likely you are to make that relationship last. There are many reasons for that and there are studies to prove that. But, just think about it. You’re bringing all that trauma of break ups, being cheated on or having cheated and so on – all that baggage – into a new relationship and expect it to survive this burden? What if all your relationships before were no longer than a year and you don’t know how to survive this post honey moon phase or how to handle an argument in a relationship? You might think that an argument or even regular arguing is a sign of the end. What happens is you never build a bond with anyone and you either end up alone or in a relationship with a guy who doesn’t care about you.

The current message to single women is, “you go girl!”, but in thirty or forty years, you might end up on the stretcher and beside you will be nobody. And if you’re a young girl and aren’t thinking seriously about who you get intimate with and who you let into your life, you will end up with a dickhead of a boyfriend like Zac who will block you if he knocks you up.

The old couple represents what we all should strive for. Our friends will not always be there for us. Our parents will not always be there for us. It’s very trendy nowadays for young women to say they don’t need men in their lives, but one day you will need a partner who will hold your hand, lend his shoulder for you to rest on, bring a bucket for your vomit, unlace your shoes to get you more comfortable and tell you everything will be ok.

If you follow today’s narrative, as a woman, you will end up alone. Men are used to it. We are used to being alone. Are you prepared for it? Choose your partners wisely. Choose who becomes the father of your children or you will one day sit in the emergency unit alone with nobody to call but your friend who has her own shit to deal with.

Under the spell: When your baby has a seizure

Oliver had just woken up from his afternoon nap. We cuddled on the sofa for a while then I offered him scrambled eggs, his favourite meal. Helium balloons from his 2nd birthday were still floating beneath the ceiling.  I put Paddington on to keep him company while I was in the kitchen, preparing the eggs when I heard him.

It sounded like hick ups, only different, consistent. I leaned out of the kitchen to check on him. He was laying on his side. He does that sometimes, I thought. I walked over to tell him to move away from the screen. What happened next is a blur yet the feelings that overwhelmed me still very intense.

Scrapped of expression and emotion, his face looked lifeless. Sparkless eyes stared into nothingness. Pool of saliva had dripped out of his mouth and collected on the sofa around his cheek. Bubbles gathered in the corner of his lips.  His body twitched silently in the rhythm of the sound he’d just made. Desperate, I picked him up and saw his lips had turned purple. His distant eyes looked right through me. Face wiped of all colour. His body limp in my hands. His arms hanging softly by his sides.

‘Oli!’, I cried to the heavens begging to not take my baby away. Paralysed by grief, I feared I was holding him for the last time.

I was shaking. My heart was racing.  Guilt, fear, and sudden awareness of the injustice and cruelty of this cold universe rushed through my mind. I need to snap out of it, I thought, and save my boy.

I thought he was choking, so I bent him over my forearm, felt his belly sink against it, and I started slapping his upper back. His arms stretched towards the floor. I was scared that I wasn’t doing it right. Scared of stopping and losing him forever, but I needed to call the ambulance.

I could barely dial the number. As I heard the voice on the other side, Oliver’s eyes closed. Maybe if I’d put his hearing aids on when he woke up, he would’ve heard my calls. I couldn’t stand the thought he was in there somewhere, scared and alone in silent darkness without his daddy’s voice to guide him.

‘My son is choking!’, I yelled with agony to the calm, almost cold and uncaring voice in the speaker. Her lack of urgency and empathy shocked and offended me.  She told me to stop slapping his back, put him on his side and try to remove saliva from his mouth, but his teeth were clamped with impossible force.

I screamed and cried down the phone. I felt I wasn’t making much sense. She asked me for the address, and this is when I realised I had to calm down and give it to her as clear as possible. Oliver wasn’t responding, his shallow breath reminded me we were running out of time. Help was on its way, she said as I looked at his face wondering if it’d ever light up again.

‘Please hurry!’, I begged as I kneeled next to my boy feeling powerless and exposed. Eggs were burning in the kitchen.

The sound of the ambulance in the distance was getting closer until the blue flashing lights penetrated that black winter afternoon outside the window. He was still unconscious, but still with me. You’re gonna be alright, I said, you’re gonna be alright.

* * *

The A&E was extremely busy. Oliver arrived there in the ambulance with my wife, who I called when the paramedics were examining him. One doctor kept shouting into the waiting area that only one parent per child was allowed, but I didn’t care. Half an hour ago, I thought I was fighting for his life. I wasn’t going anywhere. Oliver would also need his mum because she breastfeeds him and he would find comfort in that surrounded by doctors and nurses wearing masks, gloves and shooting Calpol down his throat. I was also the one who found him and could describe what happened. That’s not the point, however. I was ready to take on anyone who would try to separate us. We needed each other.

It was the shouting doctor who called out our son’s name. Finally, we thought after four hours of waiting, passing Oliver to each other so we could each get some rest.  She was short, slightly overweight and with blonde hair. We followed her into the room where she turned out to be quite pleasant and didn’t mention the “one parent” policy.

She listened to my description of Oliver’s symptoms and took notes. She said that it all sounded like he had had a seizure. She said it was very common in kids and that it happens when body temperature rises suddenly as opposed to gradually. When she said that, I went back to the moment I found him laying on the sofa, in the pool of his own saliva, and I remembered thinking it looked like seizure, but the only seizure I had ever seen was in movies. ‘Why would Oliver even have seizure?’, I asked myself. I dismissed this possibility and assumed he put something in his mouth and choked on it.

Minutes after we sat down in the waiting area, he had another seizure. He shook violently and his eyes rolled and rested in the corner of his eyelids, looking nowhere again. Terrified mothers moved their kids out of the way as we were rushed into a separate room where Oliver was taken care of immediately. Less than a minute later, Oliver was in the same state as when I found him on the sofa, just a few hours before.

Over the next three days, doctors were trying to find out what had caused the seizure. They took swab tests, urine test and the worst of them all, the blood test. They all came back with nothing. We were sent home with some antibiotics, but nobody really knows what happened.

There are parents out there who have lost their children. I know that. My son wasn’t dying, but when I saw him, I thought he was. Even when I thought he was choking and I knew what to do, I knew that there was a chance I would fail. I believe that the pain I felt, is the same pain experienced by anyone who has ever held their dying child in their arms. Nobody who hasn’t been through it will ever know what it feels like, they can only imagine. And I can only imagine what it feels like to go through it and actually lose a child. What I felt cannot be replicated. The same pain cannot be felt when your dog dies or when your team loses the world cup final. It cannot be felt by anybody but the parent who holds their child for the last time or believes it is the last time. Perhaps this post will be found by other parents out there who can relate to these strong emotions or maybe some of them will find comfort in knowing that if a baby has a seizure, it normally goes away within minutes and they don’t even remember it happened. Thank you for reading.

Why do parents do this to their children?

This is something that has been on my mind for a long time – long before I became a father myself. Why do some parents pierce their infants’ and toddlers’ ears? I can’t get over it. As a parent, your job is to do what’s in the best interest of the child. Are piercings really in their best interest? Are they really necessary? Every time I see a little girl with a shiny dot in her ear, I look at the parents and wish I could ask them why they did this. Was it worth it? It’s not like it’s in the best interest of the child. The child didn’t ask for it and even if she expressed any interest in her mom’s piercings, what kind of mother just goes, “yeah, let’s get you one of these, sweetheart!”? I highly doubt any fathers out there decide to take their daughters to Claire’s and get them an ear piece, but how do they just allow it?

Some people might be sitting there thinking, “Oh, it’s just a little prick, what is the big deal?” Well, the thing is, it’s still not in the best interest of the child. It doesn’t make her life any better and it’s pretty clear it just the mom’s weird desire to put shiny things on her daughter while causing her pain in the process. Just let kids be kids and leave their bodies alone.

It’s not even that I am judging somebody’s style of parenting. This has nothing to do with parenting. Style of parenting would be the way the child is being disciplined or whether she is allowed any screen time, not whether the parents put shiny objects in her ears.

I already know the answer to the question, though. It’s probably something along the lines of, “because it’s pretty”, or “cute”. But is this really a good enough reason? I don’t think so.

writing again

It’s been so long since I wrote on this page. So long since I wrote anything at all. It seems like, since COVID ended, nothing is worth talking about. Sure there is the war and there is the big abortion debate in America, but I am not really interested in these issues. Life is moving on for me and I haven’t had time to sit down and gather my thoughts on anything for almost a year. Actually, I haven’t made time to do it. But how could I? Between working and being a father to a toddler it’s really not easy to fit many other activities. But writing is such a great tool to find out what we really think that I decided to spend even as little as ten minutes a day to spill my thoughts on the keyboard.

Looking into the notes on my phone, I can see ideas I’ve had for articles – many of them thought provoking and controversial. Many of them, unfortunately, are no longer relevant. I was writing a great piece exposing the behaviour of people during the pandemic – how many people did “the right thing” simply because everyone else was doing it. But then it became old news and I am happy with that. I don’t want to live in the past. I see so many people on social media still exposing the lies, still fighting. I can’t live like this. I even think it’s time to admit that many of our predictions were, in fact, just conspiracy theories and we were simply wrong about them.

It surprises me, for example, how many of the people who were against the lockdowns and everything that happened, were also complete lunatics when it came to other things. The whole anti-lockdown movement has been crowded with people who believe dinosaurs never existed and that the Earth is flat. They believe star signs have a real meaning in determining our past, present and future – also known as astrology. I don’t buy any of that. It’s only when I look at some of the things we have been saying with some distance or when I hear others saying them still today, I cringe with embarrassment that I at some point said the same things.

I think many people who were fighting the good fight now suffer from the same thing they accused others of suffering from – the Stockholm Syndrome. They used to say, we used to say that people wanted to be stuck in an endless circle of lockdowns and were filling to cut the government some slack for their lies and incompetence. Now that everything seems to be back to normal, at least for the most part, people still think we are in the fight between good and evil. They refuse to believe that we’ve either won the battle or that it is over and we were wrong. We were wrong to think there was a conspiracy to get us all vaccinated, microchipped or eliminated. What they think, instead, is that all this is still happening but has been postponed because of the resistance. Resistance? Please! Comparing to the compliance, resistance was fragile and tiny. Don’t get me wrong, I’d still resist if we were faced with the slightest sign of government overreach and tyranny. I’d rather die on my feet than spend my life on my knees.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that even though the general population were getting fed up with face masks, PCR tests and all that crap we were made to do to go about our lives, the general population have also shown that no matter how inconvenient things get, how wrong they might feel they’d still comply. Especially in the UK, I think, where people don’t have a history of suffering, fighting for independence and against tyranny. If you grew up in Eastern Europe, like me, you’d have it in your blood. In England, people will be walked into by someone and still apologise. You can’t stand up to a tyrant, if you believe there is one, if you apologise for being walked into by someone.

I’m not even sorry. It’s time to admit we were wrong about some things. The sky is probably not being sprayed with chemicals designed to kill some of us. After all, the people behind it would be exposing themselves or their families to the same danger. When I pointed this out to someone, they said, “well, the elite have their way to get away from it”. The dinosaurs most likely did exist and their bones are as old as scientists say they are. Our blue planet most likely is round and not flat and Soros probably doesn’t want to see the world burn.

I won’t edit this. It was just for me to find out what’s on my mind today.

Lockdown for dummies

It looks like, fingers crossed, the restrictions are finally going away on the 19th July. This article may, therefore, be irrelevant, but there are still people (and a lot of them, too) who wish for the restrictions to remain and for lockdown to continue. This article is for them. It’s something I started writing a couple of months ago, but then a little bit of freedom got in the way and I didn’t see the point. As I work on other material, here is “Lockdown for Dummies”.

About a week ago, the world leaders got on their private jets and gathered in Cornwall to discuss some important issues and pose for some socially distanced pictures before mingling like old friends, laughing and drinking like the issues they had come to discuss were all a joke. Face masks were only worn by the peasants serving them alcohol and clearing their tables. The so called “elites”, including the Queen herself, were enjoying each other’s uncovered faces like the Indian, Nepal, Thai and Delta COVID strains were all made up tales they had been telling us for months to keep us obedient. Kind of like that mother in the shop who tells her naughty toddler that “the man will tell her off” or “the man will take her away”, just to make her settle down. When I worked in retail, I often found myself in the position of “the man” and I never wanted to.

As they discussed, shook hands and posed for fake pictures, we learned that Boris Johnson was planning to postpone the “Freedom Day”. This was no surprise to me, to be honest. I must admit, however, since April 12, things for me have been rather normal. I’ve even seen people commenting on feeling the same – gyms are open, shops are open, pubs are open and so on. Some people even demand that people like me explain why we continue to protest and raise our voices when things are now more or less “normal”. This normality, however, is just an illusion. There are still many things we cannot do, jobs lost, and medical treatments delayed. Many people still fail to understand those real-life consequences of prolonging this nightmare called lockdown. For these dummies, I shall use a real-life analogy to illustrate how locking the country down to protect one group of people negatively affects other groups of people and nobody can or should really claim to know what sacrifice is required by us for the greater good.

(At the moment of writing this, so called experts are calling for another “Winter lockdown”, which makes it even more essential for people to understand why lockdowns are harmful and why they are a mistake we should not only never repeat but hold our politicians criminally responsible for it.)

Back in February of this year, Mark, the CEO of the gym I work at, well, I worked at before the apocalypse, called upon all his employees to give them the good and the bad news. Before I get to them, let me give you a little background.

The gym is only a small part of the well-established charity that operates nationwide. They run charity shops, provide housing, shelter for homeless people and support physical activity by providing access to cheap gym and other fitness activities for all levels and ages, including gymnastics for young kids. They do a lot for the community and they have been for many years.

Mark organised a Zoom meeting with everyone working at the Watford gym. He had good and bad news to tell us. The good news was that the charity was expanding and extending their helping hand to the local homeless people. The heads of the charity had decided to end homelessness in the local area. Everyone agreed that it was a Nobel goal. Unfortunately, the good news was also the bad news. The only way for this to happen was to transform the gym into a living area for the homeless. The idea was to turn the gym into a couple of dozen self-sufficient (and COVID19 secure) rooms for the homeless people already sheltering using the charity’s services to move on and step back into a normal life. In other words, what Mark was telling us was that we weren’t coming back when gyms would reopen, and our jobs were gone.

I was only ever a casual worker and I still had full time job waiting for me in April, but some people had worked there for a couple of decades. I remember Vicky and Joe both working there fifteen years ago when I first signed up to be a member of the gym. We had all felt connected to that place in one way or another and felt like part of us was being ripped out of us and slaughtered in front of us with no justification. Suddenly, ending homelessness wasn’t on our minds. Joe was the most vocal about his feelings. He was devastated. He thought it was unfair. He said that he thought us and the service we provided as a fitness facility, the community we had built didn’t matter to the people signing it all away. He brought up that mental health of people relying on our gym was being neglected and the decision to close us down was disrespectful to our two thousand members and staff. He complained that there was no impact assessment, no consultation and no easy transition and concluded that he had expected better. He acknowledged that helping homeless people was a great initiative but felt betrayed. He didn’t believe that creating twenty-four affordable rooms for rough sleepers justified sacrificing gym staff and members. Mark sat in front of his laptop and responded to Joe’s points in the manner of a politician and he wasn’t taking ownership of the decision and its negative impact on thousands of people, but we all agreed with Joe, who felt very passionate about his views.

After the first lockdown, we had to telephone every member to let them know we were reopening. I was given a list of people to call and welcome them back. Almost all the people on my list were born during WW2. The vast majority of them didn’t own a mobile phone or had an email address and access to the internet. Our gym was the only gym in the area that could accommodate people in that age group. It was quiet, bright and accessible. Most gyms have adopted online joining process, but at our gym everything was still done the old-fashioned way – by filling up the paperwork at the reception, a process a lot easier for people without a computer or a smartphone. Now, these people had virtually nowhere to go to remain physically active.

Our building was also home for local Gymnastic Club, who just over two years ago spent £100k on new equipment and have now been left with nowhere to go. Their small team provided lessons for hundreds of young children a week, who are now also left with limited options. Sure, their parents might find another gymnastic club in the area, but they might not. We were in the heart of our town – easy to get to by car, bus or foot. Other places might not be that accessible for many parents. Many children might also not like the new environment and will simply give up all together.

It’s tempting to say that the gym staff, the gymnastic club team, the elderly gym members and the children and their parents simply must adapt, find a new job, new gym and new venue. It seems easy enough. But it’s not. This place meant something to all these people. They’ve invested their life and career in this place. They’ve committed to it. And for the members and the children change might not be that easy and might never come. It’s not as simple as signing up at a different place. If you’ve ever lacked motivation, focus, determination, passion, willingness to change, found it hard to adapt to a new situation, even temporarily, then you know that a lot of things have to happen inside of our minds for a simple change in our behaviour to take place. Simply put, many of these people will never resume their fitness journey.

The cause – to save the homeless people – was very generous and virtuous, but it came at a cost. It meant that people would lose jobs, careers, way to maintain good mental health and physical wellbeing and quite possibly, the only place where they could make friends. Imagine for a moment that we are not talking about saving every last homeless person in Watford, but about protecting the vulnerable from catching COVID19 or the NHS from becoming overwhelmed. To achieve these goals, the government acts like Mark, the CEO we met earlier. They decide what people need protecting and at what price. This price has been paid by many of us in multiple currencies. We’ve been told to put our own mental and physical health on hold so that we wouldn’t “pass it on”. We’ve had our cancer treatment postponed, delayed or cancelled. We’ve lost our jobs, not been able to pay rent, mortgage or simple bills because of furlough pay cut. Our marriages have suffered, relationships ended. We’ve dived deeper into loneliness and depression. We’ve lived in a state of constant fear and guilt. All this to protect a small number of people who may suffer from coronavirus. All to protect them by treating them like they all want the same thing and COVID19 is their only Kryptonite and nothing else could possibly hurt them. Many of them, just like many homeless people, simply don’t want help. They want to be left alone and do their own thing. They don’t want any authority telling them how to live and that they need their help. It’s insulting.

There you have it. Lockdown for dummies. Looks nice on paper, but in the end, behind the scenes, people suffer greatly as a result of decisions made by government who treat us like a concept, like a collective and not individuals with individual goals, wants, needs and fears. We can’t all be treated like sick people because we won’t all react to coronavirus the same way. We can’t all be protected from coronavirus if the price of this protection is too high and we end up losing valuable time and experiences just to stay alive. That’s why the best policy has always been personal responsibility. Don’t wait for the government to restrict or ruin the lives of everyone so that you can be safe. Take ownership of your life and your health and simply restrict your own life to keep yourself safe. You’ve done it for a year with government’s orders, you can now continue doing it voluntarily. Sure, you might lose your job for continuous self-isolating, but many of us have. Sure, you might lose your relationship because you don’t want to go out, but it’s ok, many of us have. You might get fat because you refuse to go back to the gym, but it’s ok, many of us have.

The choice is yours. Always has been. Are you going to be a dummy?

You think you are free

Nazi Germany – a dark and shameful chapter in our not-so-distant past. We have written books about it, made movies and documentaries. Some of them attempt to answer the question we all ask ourselves: How was it allowed to happen? The best answer I’ve come across comes from Milton Mayer, a German – American professor and journalist, who in the early 1950s, when the wounds of war, the shame and regret were still healing, spent six months interviewing and befriending ten Nazis to answer that very question. What Mayer hadn’t told his ten Nazi friends was that he was Jewish. In 1955, his book – They thought they were free – composed of the testimonies and memories of these Nazis, was published. It was, in my opinion, not only the answer to the question that haunts us all, but also a warning that humanity is always one obedient step away from walking into the wired fence of a new regime.

This book should, in my opinion, snap anyone out of their daydream. It should be a wake-up call for those who are still under the illusion that we will soon get our lives back, our freedom back. This illusion, this fantasy that if we just keep our heads down, follow along, listen to the guidance, obey the rules and never ask any questions we will get back to normal. But just a few fragments from Mayer’s book, which I quoted below, show that this delusion is nothing new. You will see that all the justifications for your inaction and non-resistance to the restrictions have been made before. All excuses for the existence and necessity of these restrictions have been made before. All your thoughts have been thought before. All your reasons, yes, ALL of them, to passively follow the tyrant and allow him to take your freedoms away, little by little, have been reasoned before. All your arguments have been argued before. All your nightmares, dreams of heroic uprising and resistance have been dreamt (and crushed) before. And in the near future, in five or ten years, or six months, I will tell you that your shame, regret and embarrassment have been felt before. But then, just as it one day was in Nazi Germany, it will be too late.

I am aware that there are people who get offended when COVID restrictions and Nazi Germany are used in the same sentence. But the very reason that Nazi Germany has burdened, traumatised, terrorized and haunted every generation since and yet people who lived through it, participated in it or turned a blind eye to it said EXACTLY the same things we hear today, is why it needs to be talked about. The same obedience existed in Nazi Germany – a far greater horror than “getting paid to stay at home” – and the same obedience was reasoned and excused just the same as it is today. This is what is frightening – the fact that during much worse and clear enslavement people still did nothing. That is why comparing today’s inaction and submission to the state to that in Hitler’s Germany makes sense – because people still did nothing and people today, too, are doing nothing.

Non-resistance to the milder indulgences paves the way to the non-resistance to the deadlier

Milton Mayer (They thought they were free)

Chapter 20
Take Germany as a city cut off from the outside world by flood or fire advancing from every direction. The mayor proclaims martial law, suspending council debate. He mobilizes the populace, assigning each section its tasks. Half the citizens are at once engaged directly in the public business. Every private act - a telephone call, the use of an electric light, the service of a physician becomes a public act. Every private right - to take a walk, to attend a meeting, to operate a printing press becomes a public right. Every private institution - the hospital, the church, the club becomes a public institution. Here, although we never think to call it by any name but pressure of necessity, we have the whole formula of totalitarianism.

Please suspend for a minute your assumptions about the world you know today. Resist the urge to say that your government would never do this or that coronavirus is a different or real threat or that the measures are justified. Whether the powers that be indented or not, in the past year, they have followed the formula of totalitarianism almost to the letter. The author continues:

The individual surrenders his individuality without a murmur, without, indeed, a second thought and not just his individual hobbies and tastes, but his individual occupation, his individual family concerns, his individual needs. The primordial community, the tribe, re-emerges, its preservation the first function of all its members. Every normal personality of the day before becomes an "authoritarian personality." A few recalcitrants have to be disciplined (vigorously, under the circumstances) for neglect or betrayal of their duty. A few groups have to be watched or, if necessary, taken in hand - the antisocial elements, the liberty-howlers, the agitators among the poor, and the known criminal gangs. For the rest of the citizens, 95 per cent or so of the population, duty is now the central fact of life. They obey, at first awkwardly but, surprisingly soon, spontaneously. 

Notice how this fragment describes the rise of tyranny without mentioning any atrocity, mass murder or prison camps. It just talks about an emergency.

Haven’t we all been asked, coerced and forced to abandon our individuality, our needs and interests for “the greater good”? Haven’t those who questioned it or refused to do so been disciplined, shamed, arrested, fined and censored? People who have preferred liberty over safety have been patronised and punished if they protested, while the majority have obeyed the rules (even admitting they made no sense), awkwardly at first, but then spontaneously, forming an orderly socially distanced queue and even turning on those who refused to get in line.

The community is suddenly an organism, a single body and a single soul, consuming its members for its own purposes. For the duration of the emergency the city does not exist for the citizen but the citizen for the city. The harder the city is pressed, the harder its citizens work for it and the more productive and efficient they become in its interest. Civic pride becomes the highest pride, for the end purpose of all one's enormous efforts is the preservation of the city. Conscientiousness is the highest virtue now, the common good the highest good […] 
What if the emergency persists, not for weeks, months, or even years, but for generations and for centuries? Unrelieved sacrifice requires compensation in the only specie available.

The author uses this analogy to show how easily regular people can obediently walk into the trap of a tyrant without even realising it, without even noticing the chains on their ankles. And still, no genocide has been mentioned. Just simple, blind and unsuspecting obedience.

Chapter 13
But then it was too late

Men who did not know that they were slaves, do not know that they have been freed

Milton Mayer (They thought they were free)
What no one seemed to notice[...] was the ever-widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany, and it became always wider.
[...] What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people little by little to being governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret, to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him made it easier to widen this gap and reassure those who would otherwise have worried about it.

Whether it’s deliberate or not, our government is using the same tactics, the same excuses to impose restrictions on us, create legislations and rules. They can’t trust the public to make their own decisions, can’t trust us with the information or can’t trust we would understand it. We are, after all, just ignorant peasants who need to be guided and ruled over. We are incapable of making our own decisions and choosing what’s best for us based on information available to us. We aren’t allowed to make mistakes or poor judgement – these belong in the free world. Those who adore the prime minister, will follow him even to their doom.

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised - perhaps not even intentionally - as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crisis and reforms, real reforms too, so occupied the people that they did not see the slow-motion underneath of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

“Temporary emergency measure” – sound familiar? Each rule, each legislation over the last year has been rushed and put in place before it had a chance to be voted on and before people had the chance to familiarise themselves with their rights and how they were being violated. Notice, too, the use of “little by little” and “gradual” – everything about the rise of tyranny was slow and patient.

One had no time to think, there was so much going on [..] the dictatorship and its whole process of its coming into being was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway [...] Most of us did not want to think about the fundamental things and never had, there was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful fundamental things to think about and kept us so busy with continuous changes and crisis and fascinated, yes fascinated by the machinations of the national enemies without and within that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing little by little all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?  
To live in this process it's absolutely not to be able to notice it [...] each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or on occasion regretted that unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these little measures that no patriotic German could resent must someday lead to, one no more saw it developing day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing - one day it is over his head. 

Because Nazi Germany is so terrifying to us today, it is even more important to read this man’s words and realise that he (and others in the book) didn’t just live through a questionable crisis or emergency. They were reflecting on what they by then knew had been the biggest crime against humanity. Yet they spoke so casually throughout this book as if all they had done was organising a few illegal gatherings during a pandemic.

Today, people, too, don’t like to think about their fundamental rights and freedoms. They never had to. Compared to safety and obedience, they are trivial and unnecessary to them. They don’t believe they were ever free. Now that they are enslaved they can’t even see the difference.

Notice too, that after the war and the Holocaust, these Germans were able to reflect on what had happened, what they had been blind to or obeyed willingly but had had no idea where all these small steps were taking them. You should, too, reflect on the last year and think on each of these small and inconsequential steps, often introduced as necessary, taken by the government, each small restriction and mandate, each promise and moved goalpost. Ask yourself: What if this is how it happens? What if this is how citizens lose their liberty, privacy and rights?

[...] 'resist the beginnings and consider the end', but one must foresee the end in order to resist or even see the beginnings; one must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done?

Unlike the Germans in 1930’s, we CAN learn from history. We can recognise the beginnings and foresee the end. We would be foolish to think that a modern-day tyranny can’t emerge in our country. Later in the book, the author tells us how those very Germans, living in Nazi regime, were convinced that fascism would never happen in their country. They thought such regime was only possible in Russia or Italy. Isn’t this what we say? That dictatorships are a thing of savage past or savage lands?

Pastor Muller said that 'when the Nazis attacked for the communists, he was a little uneasy, but after all he was not a communist, so he did nothing; and then they attacked the socialists and he was a little uneasier, but still he was not a socialist and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews and so on and he was always uneasier but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the church, and he was a churchman, and he did something but then it was too late.

In other words, you may be comfortable now. You may have convinced yourself by now that what has been taken from you was never of any real value to you anyway. You may think that everyone should be forced to wear a mask, get injected and require proof of it to go into a nightclub. You may believe all that because you have no problem doing any of it. You may not believe in personal choice and freedom in this matter. But there will come a day when they come for you too. On that day, remember pastor Muller and his chilling realisation.

One doesn't see exactly where or how to move; each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse, you wait for the next and the next, you wait for one great shocking occasion thinking that others, when such shocking comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act or even talk alone, you don't want to go out of your way to make trouble. Why not? Well you're not in a habit of doing it, and it is not just fear, fear of standing alone that restrains you, it is also a genuine uncertainty. Uncertainty is a very important factor and instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside in the street, in the general community everyone is happy; one hears no protests and certainly sees none. In your own community you speak privately to your friends, some of whom certainly feel as you do, but what do they say? They say 'it's not so bad' or that you're seeing things or you're an alarmist. And you are an alarmist. You are saying that THIS must lead to THIS and you can't prove it; these are the beginnings, but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end and how do you know the end? On the one hand, your enemy - the regime, the party - intimidate you, on the other your friends poo poo you as pessimistic or even neurotic.

A few weeks ago, I attended the anti-lockdown protest in London. There were tens of thousands of people marching by my side. Last week, there was a round two and an even greater number of people marched through the streets of London, protesting vaccine passports and further restrictions. The mainstream media failed to report on such large and overwhelming gathering and when they did, they claimed there were just a few hundred protesters. Boris Johnson has not addressed any of it, even though we are his people, and we are clearly uneasy and anxious about something. This lack of response creates an illusion that there is no resistance, that everyone is happy and obedient.

And again, we are reminded of how small and insignificant the steps of the tyrant are. We are reminded that calling for resistance and mass disobedience grants you a label of an alarmist or a conspiracy theorist or a denier.

small, insignificant steps – each a little worse than the previous led to concentration camps.
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join you never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes millions would have been sufficiently shocked - if let us say, the gassing of the Jews in 1943 had come immediately after the “German firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in 33. But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than step B, and if you didn't not make a stand at step B, why should you at step C? And so on to step D. And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy and a minor incident [...] collapses it all at once and you see that everything, EVERYTHING has changed and changed completely under your nose. [...] now you live in a world of hate and fear and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves. When everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system that rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

I think the above fragment speaks for itself. I will end on this, however: All ten Nazis interviewed in the book had trouble answering one simple question – what they thought they had done wrong. When trying to explain their actions and what was right and what was wrong, good or evil, they always answered with what had been legal or illegal, popular and unpopular. Think about it for a second – of course they were ashamed of their actions and couldn’t face the responsibility for that shame, so, instead, quoted the rules. Sound familiar? The rules dictated their morality. The law was their moral compass. They thought they were free. Do you think you are free?

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Just following orders

When I started this blog, back in 2019, my plan was to write about a variety of subjects and express, what I hoped to be, thought-provoking opinions. It was never my intention to focus on a single issue. The pandemic, however, interrupted my attempt at exposing the world’s truths and life’s meaning. I also never thought that I would witness the collapse of human dignity, compassion and consciousness. I didn’t dare to think that I’d see our basic freedoms arrested and our fundamental rights crushed, and our very nature denied to us and debunked, our humanity ripped from our mother’s arms. But here we are – year 2021. It’s beginning to look a lot like Nineteen eighty-four.

part 1

The ordinary world

Six O Four

Malbork, Poland, 2002. 
I am fifteen. It’s a warm Summer afternoon. My friends and I have just been playing football and we are now hanging out at our favourite spot – the bench under the rowan tree by the road leading to our estate. As we sit here, minding our business and causing no trouble, a police van pulls over and two bulky, bald police officers step out. They can’t be a lot older than us. Early 20s, I think. They come up to us and start asking questions. They demand that we give them our details, starting with our full name, date and place of birth, and full names of our parents. They look like they’re enjoying themselves. They talk to us like we’re guilty of some crime they’re investigating, but we haven’t done anything wrong.    
In fact, we are just a bunch of losers and everyone knows this. Girls want nothing to do with us, cool kids don’t want to shake our hands in school and to top it off, there is this one guy, probably around the age of Bulk and Skull over here, who always kicks our ball away when it ends up anywhere near him and his friends – the real troublemakers of our estate. They smoke and do drugs, while all we want to do is play football and sit on a bench looking at nice cars and girls who are out of our league.
One of the cops orders me to take my hands out of my pockets. I know it’s disrespectful, but he hasn’t earned my respect. It is clear that they are trying to intimidate us. They must hold some kind of grudge against guys like us or perhaps they used to be bullies themselves and they’ve never grown out of it. Proud of themselves, they now get back into their van and drive off. We take a note of the number, it’s 604.
It happens a few more times this Summer. It’s always the same scenario and the same oversized idiots with shaved heads, trying to teach us respect through intimidation. We’re never guilty of anything, but just in case, whenever we see a police van approaching and whenever we see the number 604 on the side of it, we try to move along to avoid another humiliating encounter with the law. By the time we see the number, however, it is usually too late.

March 2021

It’s my fifteenth year in the UK. My experience with the British police has been drastically different. Not only that, but I’ve also never felt threatened or intimidated by a police officer. This has been the case until lockdowns began twelve months ago. Sometime in April of last year, my respect and admiration for the British uniform started to fade.

Great Britain – the country that gave us democracy, the country that many Eastern Europeans like me escaped to in search of a better tomorrow – had begun to turn into the authoritarian regime and police state many of us ran away from. I know, as a foreigner, I should probably not speak negatively of the country I’ve settled in, but whatever was once Great about Britain, has died of COVID, I think. And I mean this about the police who forgot their oath, government officials who seem to have turned into tyrants who do things to us instead of for us anymore and think we are their property, as well as people of Britain, who have exposed their true nature of spineless cowards who play dead on the battlefield.

*

I sat on a bench today, just outside the library and the Town Hall which has been turned into COVID19 vaccination centre. I sat there for about an hour waiting for my wife and our three-month-old son to finish at the doctor’s. He was having his blood taken as part of the ongoing investigation into his hearing loss. I’ve attended a couple of initial appointments when we were given the diagnose and crucial information. Then, both because of their One Parent Because of COVID19 policy and my lack of challenging it when the appointments were no longer scary but routine, I just waited outside or took a walk.

Today, I decided to sit on the bench instead of waiting outside. I felt like such an outlaw. For the past few months, doing such a thing has been unthinkable. Sitting on a bench has been viewed as a dangerous crime and health hazard. I sat there and listened to Edward Snowden’s Permanent Record on Audible. As I listened to Snowden’s confession what led him to expose the US government’s betrayal of their citizens, I was looking at groups of college kids laughing, talking, hugging and chatting, eating takeaways as they walked to town or back to college. If it weren’t for the fact that the majority of them wore masks, I’d have thought it was just an ordinary day in an ordinary world where COVID19 never existed.

I used to sit on this particular bench a lot when I first came to the UK fifteen years ago. I would look at the people, couples holding hands, young guys and girls getting out of taxis and refusing to wear coats (presumably to avoid leaving them behind in the nightclub), runners, guys with gym bags drinking protein shakes, you know, all these ordinary things happening every day in the ordinary world. A world where I, sitting on that bench, could afford to struggle with my own identity as I measured the behaviour of the herd. I could afford to sit there as long as it took me to collect my thoughts, write poetry and dream. Back in the ordinary world.  Back when I had my whole life ahead of me and I took it for granted. Back when I could sit there until my skin shivered or until I found the missing piece of the puzzle. What burden was I carrying? What mystery of my mind was I trying to solve? How unaware was I of what was being plotted behind the scenes? How blind was I to the strings attached to all of our shoulders? Perhaps, as I sat there unaware, ignorant and small, handshakes were being exchanged, signatures given, funds transferred, things arranged, alibi prepared, consent manufactured – all to one day take away every dream I had dreamt on that bench, crush every plan I had thought of, dispose of everything I had held dear and precious.

Today, I don’t have that luxury, that freedom. Doing such an ordinary thing belongs in the past. “The rules” say so. As I sat there, a lone police officer emerged from the underground passage. When I saw him, I had a familiar feeling. The feeling a man only gets to feel a few times in his lifetime. When he sees the love of his life, the most beautiful woman, object of his love songs and poetry walk in the room and he has to tell her how he feels. And when his great nemesis or his army charge at him and he has to fight. It’s about fear and conquering that fear. It’s a quick, sharp excitement and anxiety in his chest that make him focused yet paralysed, ready to fight and ready to hide.

That’s what I felt that moment I laid my eyes on the policeman. The sharp feeling in my chest was gone before I knew it, yet it expressed so many things all at once. ‘Is this the time I get confronted?’, it asked, exposing my lack or preparedness for the confrontation I had been anticipating and rehearsing for months. More importantly, it reminded me of the time I last felt it about the police. That summer I was harassed by 604’s Bulk and Skull. It also made me realise that as a thirty – four-year-old father, husband, legally employed and a law-abiding citizen I should never feel this about the police. After all, they are not my enemy and I’m not guilty of anything. My body should not turn on and prepare to flee or confront them. But because of how many of them have behaved over the last year, I now feel like a fugitive, who must always be ready to run, resist and sees them not as public servants, but as the enemy. Enemy of human nature, freedom and dignity.

Luckily, the cop wasn’t interested in my suspicious activity. It was just me and Edward again.

The lift

Malbork, Poland, 2002.
Finally, they get what they wanted. They’ve created a monster.
My friend, Adrian, isn’t a member of our group, but he hangs out with us occasionally. Part of the reason is that he lives in a tower block in a different part of town, and he prefers homework than sitting on a bench. Not all of us have mobile phones, so there are only two ways for us to all get together. We either specify time and place of assembly when at school or we pick everyone one by one by calling at their address until everyone is accounted for. Since Adrian goes to a different school and lives so far for us to get him, we simply don’t bother most of the time. When we do, however, we make his neighbours’ life a living hell. 
The lifts in those buildings are old, nothing like you might be imagining. The doors aren’t automatic. You have to pull or push them to open. Once the floor number is pressed and the door shut, you’re on your way.  Our favourite thing to do is getting in the lift on the ground floor, pressing the button and holding the door slightly open for the next person who walks into the building. It’s often someone old. We stand there, holding the door, showing we’re waiting for them. We never hold the door wide open. Instead, we leave the smallest gap and that’s crucial to our prank. They always look very grateful as they show their appreciation and perform their mini jog to get in the lift with us. At the last second, when they are about to grab the handle on the other side, we release the door and watch their gratitude turn into disappointment as we fill the inside of the lift with mocking, knee - slapping laughter. We’ve done it countless times, but today, we’ve done it to the wrong man.
He’s just chased us out of the building and as we’re in a safe distance, I extend my right arm and show him the middle finger. We are still laughing at the look on his face when his hope to get in the lift turned into embarrassment, when he appears out of nowhere and grabs me by the arm. Huffing and puffing from under his thick, unkept moustache, he looks particularly angry with me for giving him the finger. He’s not even mad about the lift thing. It’s the middle finger that bothers him. My friends abandon me, accepting that I have taken it too far and am now on my own.
‘Where do you live?’, he asks. 
‘Just around the corner’, I lie, thinking he will let me go. Instead, he squeezes my arm tighter and demands I take him to my parents. ‘I’m lying, I don’t live around here’, again thinking he lets me go.
I try to release myself, but my teenage strength is no match for his manly grip. His friend approaches on his bike and together they come to the conclusion that it’s best to call the police. I tell them both to fuck off, which gives the friend the permission to suggest that they “rough me up a little” before cops arrive. He does nothing. I struggle, but his hand doesn’t let go. The old man must be producing his whole strength from his front porch, I think. The police arrive and Moustache releases his sausage fingers from my arm. His grip made my coat all wrinkly. He lies to the officers, saying I “threatened him with violence”. The friend nods and confirms. I can’t see my face, but I feel angry and as I make my way to the back of the car, I call him a fucking liar and demand my version to be heard. They don’t wanna to know.
It’s a short ride home in the backseat. What crime have I committed that I am being taken home for it? We drive past the rowan tree bench and it’s occupied by my friends who were quick to abandon me. Few minutes later I am being dragged upstairs and for the first time in the last half an hour, I feel anxious. I didn’t care about Moustache and his fat, sweaty hand. Not even about his courageous friend who threatened to beat me up. Hell, I didn’t even care about them calling the police. It is my mom who I am really afraid of. The police do the talking, I am just silent and embarrassed.

Just follow the rules

You can’t torture an animal forever without it lashing out

Jordan Peterson

If you are reading this, I’m sure I don’t have to explain in great detail what my feelings toward the police are based on. I suspect, what brought you here is the same resentment I feel after having watched hours of social media clips of police abusing their power, enforcing COVID rules. If you’re like me, these videos make you feel sick, angry and upset. They wake within you the unfamiliar rage and fury you had no idea you were capable of feeling. Maybe it even frightens you what you might do if these feelings are left unchecked. You imagine yourself punching, kicking and spitting your way out of the unlawful arrest while simultaneously knowing this would never end well for you. But it helps, doesn’t it? It feels so good seeing your fists land on their faces, making their surgical masks turn red. It feels good visualising, even for a minute, defeating the bad guys, serving justice and coming out as the hero. I know it works for me. It silences this desperation burning within me as I see people being tackled to the ground in their own homes for the crime of having dinner with their family. If you’re anything like me, this sense of injustice overwhelms you because you know these bastards get away with it every time and only their consciousness will ever be their judge and their executioner.

A few weeks ago, the government requested every concerned citizen to express in their own words the negative effects lockdown had on various aspects of their life, including mental health. I don’t know what I was hoping it would achieve, but I decided to submit my evidence, in which I say:

I imagine myself being dragged into a van after attending a protest in the near future. Then put in a cell and the rage, I am not supposed to feel as a father, returns. I shouldn’t feel like this. These emotions have come out of nowhere. In the first lockdown, I was fine. I was reading a lot, I was outside a lot. Now I feel like a ticking time bomb. These negative emotions – anger mixed with desperation, anxiety, heartbreak, rejection, bitterness – they don’t even have an outlet…

I described myself as a ticking timebomb. Probably not the wisest choice of words in a letter to the government, but I didn’t care. Perhaps I even wanted them to come for me. Take me into a room and play good cop and bad cop, asking me what I meant, who I worked for. What did I mean? This next fragment explains it well:

I should be the happiest I’ve ever been, but recently, I find myself feeling emotions I’ve never felt before. I feel anger, resentment and hopelessness. I feel powerless and desperate to the point where I want to cry or break something and who knows what I will do if I’m caught off guard? These negative feelings aren’t directed at my family. But this anger turns into rage within me, and I never knew it was there. This desperation I feel inside makes me so depressed sometimes and I feel I have no control over what happens to my life

The only time I ever feel anything close to how I’ve felt for the last few months is whenever I see a movie where the character is being kept hostage, tortured, isolated and made do things against his will by his tyrannical captors. When I see the scenes of this injustice, I boil inside, crave revenge and imagine what I would do to them if I managed to set myself free. In my mind, I do unspeakable things.

I see the same injustice when I watch a video of police attacking protesters, mothers with children, friends having coffee together and families in their homes. People often say that to avoid being fined or arrested, all we have to do is just “follow the rules”. Just follow the rules, they say. Never mind that the rules intrude and trespass on our rights, ruin our freedoms, criminalise choice and oppress people’s needs and interests. These cowards who welcome this invasion with open arms often defend their submission by pointing out various laws that they claim already take away our freedom. Their best example is usually something to do with speed limits (because of course, given the freedom to do so, everyone wants to drive like a maniac).

These people don’t understand the meaning of personal rights, where they come from and why no other person, no matter their position, can take these rights away. They don’t understand the concept of personal responsibility and that they themselves are the only ones who they should rely on to stay safe, not just from COVID19, but from any threat.

Another thing they love to say, especially to me since I am a foreigner, is something along the lines of, “go back to Poland, if you don’t like the rules of this country”. This easily translates to: if you want your freedom; if you don’t want to live in an authoritarian regime; if you don’t agree that police should have such powers; if you want to have rights then go to a country that provides them. They love to ridicule and belittle you for valuing freedom over safety and individual rights over collective duty. “Grow up!”, they often tell me. As if holding these values is immature and childlike, while theirs are morally superior and wise.

“Without rules there is only chaos”, they also say, which of course is a fallacy. It implies that people would just go crazy if the rules weren’t written down. But laws, at least the criminal laws, exist mainly to discourage and punish criminals. Most people are not criminals. Laws might be printed by man, but man’s morality is the ink. Most people not only recognise that murder is wrong but are unable to even picture themselves killing anyone. The law against murder, then, exists to discourage and punish the very few who are able to commit such an act. These men, who are a small fraction of the population, who don’t share the morals of the rest of us, who don’t value another man’s life, who aren’t scared of pulling the trigger are the reason why laws are written down. I would argue even in absence of certain laws, most people would have no desire to murder, rob and rape. Most men, as an example, find the idea of rape repulsive (widely available porn only confirms that) and that’s why they don’t do it, not because they are afraid of getting caught.

Most people simply want to live and let live without causing any harm to another person and his property. Other laws exist merely as reminders how to live in the community, guidance for businesses and protection of individual rights. Furthermore, laws and morality don’t always go hand in hand. For example, in some countries, prostitution is illegal, but it’s not immoral. Lying to your friend or cheating in your relationship are immoral, but they are not illegal. Not paying your debt is not a criminal offence, but it may be considered immoral. I would argue that forbidding lovers see each other for months on end is immoral and criminalising it is unlawful. Yet here we are.

It’s also interesting to see how many people simply needed new rules to be written down to completely abandon their empathy for another person. They just needed a rule to exist to see a normal, harmless activity as a crime for which someone should be put to death. They turn into totalitarian boot lickers happy to snitch on their neighbours for having guests for dinner. This tells a lot about people in this country.

a few bad apples

Just as people needed new policies and rules to turn on their neighbours and fellow citizens, to a number of police officers they were simply an excuse to become tyrants they always had been. Perhaps the surgical mask they now have to wear provides them with anonymity they needed to disconnect from their actions towards other men and women.

They may be in a small minority, but it doesn’t change the fact that the rest of them just follow along and turn the other way. That small minority is enough for there to be hundreds of videos exposing their abuse of power during lockdown. It has been happening here in the UK and all over the Western World. In Australia, a woman was arrested in her own home, in front of her children for organising a protest on Facebook. Another man had his front door kicked in for the same reason. A video from Poland shows officers tackling a man to the ground for refusing to wear a mask and threatening his friend with a gun for attempting to intervene. Just the other day, I saw a footage from a grocery store in Netherlands, where the security man not only attempts to forcibly remove an unmasked shopper from the store but gets assistance from a man wearing a mask like a good boy. There are many more examples, way too many to list them here. In Germany, the country that should know better, the police are seen using water to disperse the crowd of protesters. Not only that, but their government also introduced the concept of quarantine camps – places for people who refuse to self–isolate after testing positive or returning from abroad. Funnily enough, a number of people in the UK fully support the idea and think it doesn’t go far enough. They think people like me should be put in prison.

What really makes these people betray their integrity and commitment to others? Is it the moral superiority of doing the right thing? What about the men in uniform? What triggers in them the brainless, unconscious and detached android mode, incapable of own thought, compassion and reasoning?

You know, I’ve been writing this for a few weeks now and I feel like I still have a long way to go. It seems like every week there is another story in the press, another video on Twitter, showing police officers intruding people’s lives and disturbing their peace. There was a video a while ago, in the Midlands I believe. A man got called an idiot by the officer and thrown in the back of the police car. The reason? The cop didn’t believe the man’s trip was essential. He didn’t believe him when he said he lived around there so he arrested him in a very disrespectful manner. If the man were a suspect of a crime, it would have been a different story, but he was only stopped, grabbed and harassed for the officer’s assumptions and misunderstanding of the law and his powers. This is not the only video I’ve seen where the police officer acts disrespectfully, threatening and patronising towards a member of the public who is just going about their daily life. And this is the crucial part – going about your business is not a crime, no matter how they put it. If you’re exercising your freedoms (in this case, the freedom of movement) and there is a law that forbids it, it is an unjust law, and your duty is to break it and resist those who come after you to enforce it. As Nelson Mandela famously said:

When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.

Nelson Mandela

In other words, if the government tells a man he can’t see his loved ones, can’t start a relationship, sit in the field and listen to the voice of nature he has no other option but to defy the government for they have no business telling him how to live his private life. And I don’t buy that “what you do is affecting others because you’re spreading the virus” nonsense. Everyone is responsible for their own destiny. We are all independent human beings and need to take responsibility for our life and ownership of our choices. We don’t exist to ensure others never fall ill, go hungry or homeless. We don’t exist so others can live. We aren’t on this planet to fulfil other people’s needs. That is at the heart of freedom – it gives each individual the right and more importantly, the power to take necessary steps to protect himself from harm, because he can’t control others. In freedom, everyone gets to make choices to live the best, happiest and healthiest life available to them. The moment you let go of that freedom, hand it over to the state, who then believe they have to take everyone’s freedoms for their safety, you end up with no responsibility for yourself and no ownership of your life. Your safety and your health, your very survival depend on what others do or don’t do. What if, one day, people simply choose not to follow the rules anymore? You will have no choice but to rely on yourself. You must understand that you wash your hands for yourself. Imagine, if you lived your life always counting on others washing theirs and relying on them doing it properly.

And now we have muzzled police turned against the public. They patrol our streets, they “hide in the shadows” and sneak up on us in parks like we’re all criminals. They stalk us, flying drones over our heads if we dare to take too long of a walk. They demand we tell them where we are going and why. They are rude, dishonest and brutal.

Part 2

The grip never relaxes

People cringe when I use the word tyranny to describe our current situation. They hear the word regime and imagine Germany in 1943, when Nazism was already well established. They never think to look beyond the dates they know from history books. They forget that tyranny comes about gradually and introduces itself in small, careful steps. The tyrant pushes the people to their limit or very close to their limit. He lets them settle, get used to the “new normal” and then pushes them further, lets them settle again and repeats.

Similarly, when you look back at the past year, you’ll see that the restrictions have been piling up on top of each other and we never, even after the first lockdown, went back to the pre – lockdown state. The government claimed almost full control of our lives and gave back very little of it. Then did it again and again, giving us back just scraps of the life we used to know. This is in essence how tyrants rise. They rise from the ashes of our humanity and they thrive in the flames of our desperation, fear and blind obedience. They take and very rarely give back.

We’ve created a system which pushes us further into becoming passive spectators and not active participants in social affairs and one that creates an illusion of having control of our lives. We have done it without asking questions, without looking back and without resisting. In this system, we aren’t taught how to lead, but how to follow. We have become a nation of sheep who are convinced they need a shepherd; we have convinced ourselves that we can’t make rational decisions for ourselves; we trust neither ourselves nor other individuals in the herd but will follow the majority led by the shepherd into our doom and slaughter.

Boris Johnson and his fellowship of the virus, put us in lockdown in March last year, taking almost full control of our lives, making them masters of our daily rituals and activities. They served us with a strict list of things we were and weren’t allowed to do. They pushed us to our limit by taking from us as much as they could. They then returned some of our freedoms, but their boot remained in the door. We were allowed to go back to work, but still lived very limited and restricted lives.

They then intimidated, threatened and coerced people into cancelling their Christmas plans. They trapped students in their student accommodations, miles away from home, set up police checkpoints outside towns on Christmas Eve to make sure people weren’t seeing their families. They terrorized our minds, intimidated us with bullies hoping we would not find a way and strength to nourish our relationships and do what we felt was right anyway. And many of us did.

The tyrant, very much like Mr. Unkept Moustache who captured me all these years ago, once he grabs you, never relaxes his grip.

We have the luxury now, to go back in time, browse through history, listen to the testimony of the survivor reliving her horrors and we can look the tyrant in the eyes. We can witness him rise from the ashes of people’s defeated courage and thrive in their desperation. We can follow his steps from his first day as the ruler to the brutal end. We swear we would have done something, that we would have refused, rebelled and stopped him. We are baffled why nobody did. Today, as we find ourselves in the midst of tyranny, we welcome the tyrant and baffle future historians with our inaction.

Run, fat boy, run!

Malbork, Poland, 2004
A knock on the door wakes me up. I roll over on my mattress, which is all I have to sleep on, and check the time. It’s just gone seven o’clock. I don’t need to be up for another hour to go to school. After last night, however, I am surprised I even slept at all, to be honest. Times like these I wish I had a mobile phone to check on my mates and see if they’re alright. See if they all got away too.
My mom gets the door. I can hear a man’s voice, but I don’t recognise it. It could be a neighbour or a postman, I don’t know. We’ve just moved here. Is it possible, though? Could it be…?
I can hear my mom’s footsteps. They’re fast, they’re angry and loud. She storms into my room and kicks my mattress, sending my pillow across the room.
‘The police are here for you! Get up! Get the fuck up and get dressed right now!’, she screams through her tears.
I pretend I have no idea what this is all about, but it’s a lie. The promise I made to her last time I was brought home by the cops is broken. I swore that was the last time. 
I am taken back to that evening we were chased by the police outside the church and I almost got away. Almost. The cop caught up with me outside the kindergarten.
‘Wait here while I run after your friend’, he said. Of course I didn’t wait. I’m not stupid.
I ran. I ran only to be caught again by the other cop. Next thing I know, the one who caught me first is dragging Andrew by his collar, which kind of made me – the fat one of the group – feel better cause he is the group’s athlete.
‘I thought I told you to wait there!’, he looked at me with disbelief and anger as I shrugged my shoulders and looked at him amazed that he really thought I was just going to wait there for him. What an idiot.
This was months ago now and we weren't even doing anything wrong. We were just fooling around and ran when we saw them. But for her it is still a fresh wound, a broken promise.
‘Hurry up!’, she brings me right back to the present and says I have five minutes to get ready. The men are waiting and will drive me to the station. I’m only seventeen, what’s the worst that can happen? Oh who am I kidding? I am shitting myself.

Seventeen years later, I expect a knock on the door and prepare for it to be kicked in. The amount of times I tweeted at Metropolitan Police calling them fascists and pathetic is more than I can remember. In the country where people get charged for things they say online, for offending others, I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens one day. Who will be the men at my door? Just some good men, men who joined the force to protect the innocent, defend our rights? Maybe. Or maybe it will be one or two tyrants who love their newfound powers? Or maybe it will just be some ordinary officers who are just following orders, right? Just doing their job. Just taking me away from my family for having an opinion or for spreading misinformation. Have you seen V for Vendetta? Asking for a friend…

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Related reading:

Coronavirus: The Speeding Driver Paradox

The Great Twitter Debates: Episode 1

Trigger Warning: Contains logic and reason

I made a mistake the other day by logging into my Twitter account and engaging in a conversation with a couple of people who were very passionate about living in chains – the lifestyle also known as lockdown. I am truly surprised that after a whole year of absorbing every misinformation and lie from their telescreens, they haven’t come up with a stronger repertoire of arguments. Instead, they tweet the same long ago debunked and ridiculed opinions as they did in April of last year. Opinions they mistakenly present as facts. One of the most often repeated “arguments”, they treat as gospel, is the Speeding Driver Paradox (SDP), which they think declares them the winner of every coronavirus debate. There could, however, be nothing further from the truth, and I shall explain why. Be careful who you share this with, not everyone can handle logic and reason in such high doses.

The Speeding Driver Paradox, like every other myth and fairy tale, when repeated too often, it too eventually loses its original form. The speeding driver becomes drunk in some translations. In others, he drives a faulty car, and yet in another, he just feels like driving on the pavement, running over pedestrians simply because it makes him happy. The last one was a direct response to my argument that one’s happiness is important and in context of COVID19 lockdowns and restrictions -which lead to depression, anxiety and suicides and medical neglect – it is even more important than other people’s lives and health. The mistake, of course, is that feeling pleasure from purposely hurting people is not the same as happiness achieved through personal and professional fulfilment and living a life of meaning. I have addressed it in my article from a few weeks ago titled Redefining selfishness – why being selfish is a good thing, where I explain why one’s own health, happiness and wellbeing should be prioritised, not neglected. Link to the article will be at the bottom of the screen.

Still too slow to catch COVID19

So, the SDP, and its many forms, attempts to compare seeing your partner for Valentine’s Day or your mom for her birthday, wanting to work and support your family to driving like a maniac. In other words, if you want the lockdown to end because it ruins your life by compromising your physical health, financial situation and mental wellbeing, if you deliberately break the restrictions to simply stay sane and alive, to live your life and exercise your freedom to do so, you are exactly like a speeding driver who has no regard for human life. Shame on you!

It originated somewhere around April or May of 2020, when people dared to sunbathe and leave their house for other “non – essential” reasons, such as getting fresh air, but not exercising at the same time. These people just sat on benches and were compared to lunatic drivers. It continues being repeated by those who just want to avoid harder questions and difficult conversations. They don’t want their lack of compassion and empathy to be exposed. They quote this misleading fallacy, which to the untrained eye may seem like a perfectly fitting analogy. The untrained individual will often lose sight of the real conversation and instead try to address the Speeding Driver Paradox and often lose the argument or patience in the process. It’s because this was never the topic of the discussion they were having and it’s unproductive to address points that have nothing to do with it.

Apples and oranges

First of all, it distracts us from the conversation we’re having, where the issue is coronavirus rules. Sure, the SDP tries to argue that rules are there to protect people and “we shouldn’t just let people drive like crazy because they feel like it”, as the argument often goes, but it is, nevertheless, like comparing apples to oranges. Traffic rules protect lives – that’s true – but they don’t cancel people’s individual human rights. For example, traffic rules don’t prevent you from driving your car. They don’t tell you that you are only allowed to drive to work and to get essentials. In other words, you have the right to move around and travel. Coronavirus rules, on the other hand, attempt to take away the very freedoms we were born with.

Furthermore, drivers need the rules to remain safe on the road. Those rules let them know what manoeuvres to expect from other drivers and what they expect in return. It would be quite difficult to drive to work, for example, if everyone could simply choose which side of the road they feel like driving on. They want to stay alive, they want their car to remain in one piece, and they don’t want to live with a burden of killing innocent people, so they must know what the rules are, because doing the opposite is often a life-or-death situation. And yes, if a person is driving irresponsibly, say, speeding, drunk or texting, they are directly responsible for the accident and its casualties. When a person suffers symptoms of an illness, it is often due to their lifestyle choices, daily activities or pre-existing conditions, therefore it is hardly logical to hold the “infector” responsible. Especially when not every infection leads to major symptoms or death. Car accidents, on the other hand, usually don’t end well for anyone involved.

If you look closely, you can see two people hugging

Moreover, traffic rules aim to prevent accidents that may lead to instant death or life-threatening injuries of the participants. It would be hard to apply the same rules to, say, mask wearing in supermarkets because if two people bump into each other when choosing their nutritious ready meals, it’s hardly similar to a speeding car running over a pedestrian – who dies instantly. A person in the supermarket may or may not be infected and they may or may not infect the other person in the isle. Additionally, if someone develops the symptoms after their visit to Morrison’s, can they really know where and when they CAUGHT it? What if they caught it on the train or a bus? When there is a fatal car accident or any car accident at all, you don’t need to ask such questions.  And that’s why traffic rules make sense – they prevent instant, undeniable and unquestionable death or irreversible injury.

It is, however, worth mentioning that most car accidents aren’t caused by dangerous driving. Most such tragedies involve drivers who follow the rules and like every other user of the road, try to stay alive. The number one cause of car accidents, according to Matthew Walker, the author of Why We Sleep is, in fact, falling asleep while driving which is the result of insufficient sleep. This can be caused by not sleeping enough the night before, but in the majority of cases, people are “too busy to sleep” and regularly sleep less than six hours per night. This, as explained in the book, may eventually lead to the overpowering urge to close your eyes for a split second, which is long enough for you to lose control over your vehicle.

It would be more reasonable to call it the Sleeping Driver Paradox then, as you could argue then that the accident is the driver’s fault, because he neglects his sleep, putting others in danger. The problem is though – there is no rule against getting insufficient sleep, there’s only advice. But it would still not relate to lockdown rule breakers, though. It is worth mentioning here that many drivers do, in fact, break the rules and drive a little over the speed limit, they use their car even if it’s technically not fit for the road because of, say, a faulty headlight. People, therefore, choose which rules are less important than others.

Cars and rifles

Another reason why this argument falls apart, assuming that dangerous driving is comparable to, say, shopping without a facemask on, is something that will require us to first abandon all logic to even go there. But let’s see what we can do. The fallacy of this opinion is perfectly illustrated when you imagine a firing squad about to execute a prisoner of war. When I was a kid, I asked my mom why it always took a group men to execute one guy. It was simply, according to her, to make sure a bullet reached the target. A single shooter could easily miss all together or only wound the prisoner or his rifle could jam, all of which would make the execution longer and more unpleasant than it needed to be. A firing squad makes sure that at least one lethal shot is fired.

I believe, in addition to that, there was a deeper reason for it. Standing in a group simply takes the burden off the individual in the firing squad. Believe it or not, but even some Nazis refused to execute Jews and many others justified their actions, as demonstrated in Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning. It has also been said that many guns found or collected after the Second World War had never been fired. This shows that soldiers might find it uneasy to shoot at the enemy or execute prisoners. The firing squad provides a release and almost a guilt free fulfilment of the soldier’s task by allowing him to pull the trigger while sharing the burden with others. Only one bullet carries the death sentence. By shooting simultaneously, none of the men ever find out if it is fired from their gun, taking the man’s life or not. They know that only one out of ten rifles fired the deadly bullet, and they can choose the comforting thought that they weren’t the one pulling that trigger. In other words, it takes ten men for one man to execute another.

I’m not trying to compare apples with oranges here, I’m trying to demonstrate why comparing apples to oranges doesn’t work and why the firing squad analogy is far better to illustrate my point than the Speeding Driver Paradox could ever hope to illustrate its own. Let’s compare apples to oranges, however, and see how ridiculous the practice really is.

All of the lockdown restrictions are equally intrusive, and they all equally compromise our physical health and mental wellbeing. Somebody who wants to look after their own health must now live outside of the rules. If you take regular walks to the park, you might have noticed that all outdoor gyms have been closed. Strangely enough, playgrounds have remained open to the public and parents have been trusted to be responsible and keep others safe. The notice on the outdoor exercise area says that people shouldn’t use it because “COVID19 can stay on the surface for up to 72 hours”. I guess COVID19 doesn’t go to crowded playgrounds. It prefers the hardly ever used outdoor gyms. I do still use them, even with the tape around them. I believe it is essential for my health and fitness and I don’t see why I should compromise that. Somehow that puts me in the same category as a lunatic driver. But how many lunatic drivers does it take to kill or injure a pedestrian? When a pedestrian almost gets hit by a speeding car and sees it disappear in the distance, the risk is no longer there. In other words, the pedestrian doesn’t need to wait 72 hours to feel safe to cross that road.

Let’s ignore the obvious inconsistency of restricting access to outdoor gyms but not to playgrounds. Let’s focus on the crime committed.

I briefly covered it above, but let’s explore this unreasonable territory. When you’re involved in a car accident, you know where and when you were hit. It happened on the motorway, on your way to work. You were hit by the blue Sedan behind you, not the red Opel parked a little too close to you at work, not the car in front of you at McDonald’s drive through and not when you were at home while your spouse used the car to collect the kids from school. It also didn’t take ten different cars to finally happen to you. It’s not like the blue Sedan hit a BMW first, then the BMW hit a Ford which then hit a Seat and a Fiat, only for the Fiat to have no symptoms of the accident so it carried on and then hit you. No – the blue Sedan hit you and now you’re in the hospital. Yet, what I’ve just described is what happens when a virus “hits” you. It travels from host to host and you never really know where and when you CAUGHT it. Was it at work? Was it in the shop? Was it somewhere else? Who do you hold responsible? That guy who stood too close to you at the Post Office? That woman who wasn’t wearing her facemask properly or the cashier who touched all your groceries? Or maybe the cashier’s son who notoriously breaks lockdown rules? Or maybe the son’s girlfriend, who got sick, but ignored it, thinking it was just a cold? More importantly, why would you blame anyone?

And before all this? Who really gave your nan the flu? What chain of events led to her getting life threatening flu? Did you bring it to her that Sunday when you were a little unwell? Where did you get it? In the pub? Train? Gym? Work? School? Say, your nan sadly died of the flu that you gave her. If you were able to trace back your infection to the very person who sneezed or coughed on you or hugged you, or simply left their house knowing they were ill, what would you do to that person? Would you hold them responsible for your nan’s death? What if your viral transaction with this person was only a coincidence and your nan actually got sick at her book club? What if you were driving your nan to the book club and the blue Sedan drove right into you because the driver was texting, injuring you and killing your nan. Would you hold them responsible? Surely you can’t honestly answer “yes, I would” to both of these scenarios.

It’s just like with the firing squad. It may take multiple different people, different interactions and places to get infected (with anything). Back in ancient times, when the man flu and common cold still existed, people used a phrase, “Something’s going around”, when everyone they knew was one by one coming down with a cold. Suddenly, your work, your gym, your yoga class, the corner shop, petrol station and your evening baking class became the firing squad and you knew their rifles were loaded with the virus, but you didn’t know who would fire first. Back then, in the pre – COVID19 era, people didn’t expect all these places to shut. They simply accepted their fate or took their precautions to stay safe.

This optical illusion actually shows one person coughing around another in the supermarket

Car accident is instant and often lethal. It affects all participants, not their work colleagues or family. Say, you’re lucky enough to get out of a car accident without a scratch (asymptomatic). You go home and within a few days your spouse develops symptoms of having been in a car accident. He or she now has a broken leg and both arms. See how stupid it sounds?

Traffic rules serve as guidance for all road users so that everyone gets safely to their destination. They are more of a manual that tells us how to use the road. There is nothing restrictive about it because it’s as old as the roads themselves. Without it, there would be collisions every minute. When dealing with heavy vehicles and high speed, they need to move in harmony and agreement with one another. Each unexpected manoeuvre will almost certainly put others in danger, while infecting others (if we assume that people infect others rather than others GET infected), our virus may never actually find its way to the vulnerable person who is waiting for it at the end of this chain of interactions. Therefore, restricting EVERYONE and treating them as potentially dangerous bags of germs is unprecedented, intrusive and wrong.

Furthermore, for the Speeding Driver Paradox to make some sense, we’d have to scrap the word Speeding, since it attempts to illustrate the asymptomatic carriers of the virus – potentially infected and infectious people. As in, people who don’t know they are posing any risk. A speeding car is not potentially speeding, it’s not potentially dangerous, it’s not an asymptomatic carrier of speed. It “knows” that such high speed carries certain death and, if met with an obstacle, will deliver it. Every car on the road right this moment is potentially dangerous (asymptomatic) because as we’ve seen earlier, most accidents happen at regular speed and involve people just trying to get from point A to point B as safely as possible. It is safe to say then, that putting your foot on the gas pedal alone is potentially dangerous. Leaving your driveway potentially puts others at risk. Buying a car at all is potentially dangerous because you might one day cause an accident – even if unintentionally. Perhaps it is the car dealers or car makers who should answer for all the traffic accidents since their products might one day cause one? Or maybe, it just makes more sense for everyone to drive like their life depended on it. Oh yeah, that’s right – it does. In other words, stay alert, keep in mind that there might be a lunatic out on the road today, but don’t get paranoid. Control what you can, which is your focus and hands on the wheel and protect yourself. Hope that other drivers are as focused as you, but don’t take that for granted, don’t assume that they aren’t getting distracted as we speed. This is, by the way, a metaphor for life – protect yourself from what you’re afraid of and don’t count on others to protect you.

As you see, if we agree that wanting to open up your business to feed your family and save what you’ve worked for your entire life is the same as driving while drunk, then we are entering the realm of ignorance and stupidity. The two are not the same. The argument is mentioned, however, to point out that they are equally as dangerous, and many people agree. Some people even think that those who routinely don’t wear facemasks should be put in prison. Some even support the idea of “Quarantine Camps” where the infected would be kept against their will. If you ever need a guide in this realm of idiocy, these people will gladly show you around.

Finally, when we are on the road, we are all vulnerable and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves from irresponsible drivers. When 2000kg of steel is travelling at 90mph and is going right at you, there is nothing you can do to stop it. You can only accept Jesus as your lord and saviour and hope Christianity got it right. When it comes to your health, there are number of things you can do not only to avoid getting sick when “something is going around”, but also to boost your immune system. This is yet another reason why not wearing a mask is unfairly compared to crazy driving. On the road, drivers are to a large extent responsible for other drivers who can’t defend themselves from unexpected manoeuvres of other cars. In a perfect world this would be enough, but we are only human and we get distracted by internal and external factors. In life, people get sick all the time and everywhere and restricting people’s freedom to stop that is unsustainable and again disturbingly wrong. We aren’t responsible for others and their health. Not like that anyway. Not even in the context of coronavirus. Speed limits don’t prevent accidents. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have them, but it’s worth remembering that the majority of accidents happen in regular circumstances where cars aren’t heard before they are seen. We can’t stop driving though, can we? So why should we stop living our lives? We weren’t born to save lives, we were born to live ours.

Share it with those who are still lost in the realm of unreason or if you came from that realm and disagree with me, and if you can construct a time worthy argument, comment below and let’s discuss. Drive safe.

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Redefining selfishness – why being selfish is a good thing – Deserts of Mars (thedesertsofmars.com)

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