However, what followed was an extraordinary one-sided item. Newsnight’s presenter, Victoria Derbyshire, proceeded to hold a three-way discussion between herself, a Just Stop Oil activist, Indigo Rumbelow, and, er, Rupert Read, formerly of Extinction Rebellion. Read now leads an embryonic organisation called the Climate Majority Project, whose web page suggests it has a strikingly similar outlook to Extinction Rebellion.
There were obvious questions to ask Rumbelow: namely, who do you think you are, thinking you have the right to ruin a sporting event that is enjoyed by millions, either as participants or spectators? And why target a running event, which is surely all about doing something of which you ought to approve: getting about on foot?
There were questions to be asked of Extinction Rebellion, too – given that it has offered to ‘police’ the event. Are climate pressure groups now operating as a kind of protection racket, to which we are also supposed to go and negotiate before we are allowed to go about our day-to-day business?
None of these questions got asked. Rather, Newsnight first ran a short video in which it asserted that ‘violence’ was being shown towards climate protesters; it illustrated this partly with a police officer doing his job and arresting a member of a mob vandalising a building with red paint.
Forget it Jake, it’s the BBC.
The BBC is still butt-hurt after one of its hacks got monstered by Elon Musk a few days ago.
And seeing as it’s Bash Auntie time, here’s a lovely low key one from a few days ago :
https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/64032536
It’s a sad story provoked by the injury to the England women’s football captain, and it reveals that anterior cruciate ligament injuries are significantly more likely to happen to women (in the archaic and offensive sense) than to men (ditto.) Apparently from 2 to 8 times more likely.
BBC stenographette inverviews sports medicine boffin. Four possible reasons are advanced – I have assigned guilt in the brackets :
1. anatomy / biomechanics (guilty party = Mother Nature)
2. hormones (Mother Nature again)
3. gender disparities (the Patriarchy)
4. (increasing) workload
4 is obviously a non sequitur – it might well be a reason for women suffering more ACL injuries than they used to, but it’s not a reason for the sex disparity, since male footballers obviously have a much bigger workload than the gals.
Anyway the bit that made me smile was the commentary on 1,2 and 3. Two of these three carried earnest cautions against leaping to conclusions – “no strong evidence from the research” and “a lack of research.” The third did not.
A free banana if you can guess which of the three did not come with a caution.
PS For the avoidance of doubt, it’s a perfectly reasonable story to run, and its also perfectly reasonable that the boffin seems to want to focus particularly on “gender disparities” since short of advising the gals to stop playing, it’s the one that might be in our power to do something about. The fun bit is that, as it’s the BBC, you can see the non-caution coming a couple of paragraphs away.
As the old saying goes, our vandalism is speech, their arresting vandals is violence.
Conservatives (and later libertarians) have been complaining about BBC bias since at least 1963 – but still insist on a special tax (“license fee”) to fund the leftist agitprop.
And if a Conservative government managed to get a backbone, and was not overthrown by a Bank of England and general Corporation organised “soft coup”, and ended the BBC Tax – the “independent” television stations are not really much better.
GB News is worth watching, and so is Fox News (if one forgets that they will fire anyone who really does annoy the establishment – the same as GB News does, no I have not forgiven what was done to Mark Steyn).
Such is life – we are at least allowed “controlled opposition”. Well for the present we are still allowed “controlled opposition”.
Even controlled opposition to the C02 is evil theory – people are still allowed to dissent from the theory, at least if they do so carefully, and do not upset international government and corporate power too much.