Having waded into the cesspit of deceptive, unprotected sex, now it is time to unfurl the malodorous nappy. (Or diaper, if you must).
This week in London a new group called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a sort of alt-Davos, or even an anti-Davos, has been meeting for two days of alt-thinking and talking.
https://www.arcforum.com/
The mission is as follows:
Newly-founded, ARC is focused on bringing together a range of thought-leaders and practitioners from across the political, business, and cultural spectrum to debate challenges facing Western civilisation and discuss practical solutions. Rather than looking to big government and top-down solutions to find the answers to society’s biggest problems, ARC is an international community that is building a vision for a better world where every citizen can prosper, contribute, and flourish.
A little cliched, and the roster looks a bit too establishment, but at first glance it seems right-headed and properly oriented. Let us hope it gets focused quick smart on the core Western problem of executive overreach. You will only get responsible citizenship when the people step up and re-take control of the State. And there seems little attention being paid to Covid era crimes against humanity. It would have been nice to have seen Andrew Bridgen there. Or Mike Yeadon. Or Kathy Gyngell of TCW (The Conservative Woman). Or the editors of Compact magazine. Like Sohrab Ahmari. Or the contrarians and dissidents. Russell Brand, anyone? Or, God help us, the populists. RFK Jr, that authentic voice for the outsider class and for real citizen push-back? Liberal Party rebels, like Craig Kelly? Tucker Carlson is an obvious absentee. None of these people are present, as far as I can see. The ARC might well be assertive, but is it, to use a ghastly term, inclusive? It all seems a little “safe”. (These are initial, preliminary reactions, and deserve fuller and more reflective analysis at a later date).
There are a number of interesting attendees at the conference. Scotty from AstraZeneca, for one. I guess he is just glad to find a gig anywhere that will have him. Morrison’s fellow Covid criminal, British Tory let-down Michael Gove is there, perhaps seeking rehabilitation. Then we have Mark Latham and John Howard. The obvious question – will they shake hands, and what form will the handshake take? The brand new Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, is there. As are anti-woke corporates who must be shaking their heads at the world’s turning to left-wing business institutions who use shareholder funds to pursue political aims like the voice to parliament and homosexual causes. Jordan Peterson is there, as are Ayaan Hirsi Ali and her partner, Niall Ferguson (the non-lockdown Ferguson). And, inevitably, the ubiquitous Douglas Murray. The Australian’s Greg Sheridan and his old mate Tony Abbott are in attendance. (That those two former adversaries, Latham and Howard, are both there and fully supportive of the new forum says several interesting thigs about the weird trajectory of our contemporary political world).
The new gathering is a brainchild of the estimable former Deputy Prime Minister, John Anderson, who has found meaning in political retirement in exploring what has gone wrong with Western culture and governance, and what might be done about it. We can all be thankful that John was found unacceptable by the “Brokeback Nats” for a comeback in the Australian Senate a year or two ago. Anderson’s co-creator of the ARC is the British Philippa Stroud, a “think tanker”. (Read insider. But insiders can be sound).
What has all this got to do with nappies?
Well, apart from Jordan Peterson’s funky suit, the thing that perhaps has got the most attention at the conference was the claim by a British Member of Parliament and Advisory Board Member of the ARC named Miriam Cates, that ninety per cent of reception teachers report kindergarten pupils now turning up for school not toilet-trained. (Of those turning up at all, after the Covid lockdowns which have created a huge and disastrous hole in school attendance. Yet another crime of the unapologetic Covid class).
Cates has been good on other issues as well, showing perhaps that there is still hope for the British Tories. If you look hard enough. She has emphasised declining birth rates (aided now, deliberately, I would think, by mRNA vaccines) and the evils of mass immigration, worthy topics, indeed, for an ARC forum. They are, not uncoincidentally, two of the core pillars of belief of the globalists. The ruling class, almost to a person, wants fewer people on the planet and the end of nationality.
There are several possible responses to Cates’ disquieting statistic about the lack of toilet training, and a few explanations (laziness, exhaustion, lack of how-to knowledge, outsourced parenting). One might be tempted to ask – only ninety per cent? Given the supermarket shelves now taken up with nappies for nine-to-eleven-year-olds, a growing market that few would have seen coming. A mere generation ago, we saw the appearance of that other, then-novel, now supermarket staple, the disposal nappy. A disposal nappy for a disposable age. Not exactly planned obsolescence, but rather a necessity for the emerging absentee, “time-poor” parent class. Wives of a certain age and their mothers – not many fathers were involved back then – will remember when they washed cloth nappies. And saved landfill from a mountain of baby excrement. This is the landfill issue about which no one rails. I wonder why. (As a plumber/drainer in Hervey Bay once said, on the side of his van, “a flush beats a full house”).
Naturally, there has been push-back – already! – against Cates’ statement of the bleeding obvious.
No-One Needed Miriam Cates’s Working Mum Guilt-Trip Today, Thanks.
Of course. This little piece of the radical feminist narrative is just too important not to have the wagons circled, with priority and vigour.
The catchy statistic shared by Miriam Cates should give forum delegates much pause for thought, and it no doubt has. It bespeaks a generation of parents that has given up trying, a generation that is too busy with work-outside-the-home to notice that work-inside-the-home is, seemingly, not getting done. At great cost, I would have thought, to a new generation of youngsters who haven’t been taught, at the appropriate age, to be masters of their domain. Being freed from the discomfort involved must be the first great liberation of life.
Talk about the (full) too-hard basket.
Child care managers have relayed how the (university trained?) child care workers of today baulk at the seedy task of changing the nappies of their charges. They don’t baulk, alas, at incorporating same-sex stereotyping, “sorry cards” and other woke agenda items into child care “curricula”. (Child care and curricula are words that shouldn’t even be used in the same sentence).
Several parents known to me are refusing to send their youngsters to pre-school now because of the politicisation of the sector.
The toilet-challenged children are being raised by a generation of parents that has simply out-sourced much of the task of raising them to the ever-encroaching State.
The Australian Government provides a Child Care Subsidy to support children and families attending early childhood education and care services. In the March quarter 2022, 48% of 0–5-year-olds (883,510 children) and 33% of 0–12-year-olds (1,334,240 children) used Australian Government subsidised child care. Of all children attending child care, 62% attended Centre Based Day Care, 37% attended Outside School Hours Care, and 6.4% attended Family Day Care. The average weekly hours of child care use per child was 27 hours (DoE 2023).
https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-welfare/childcare-and-early-childhood-education
These are pretty substantial numbers.
Ironically, this is occurring at a time when many people seem to believe that one parent should remain in the home while children are at pre-school age. A recent American poll came up with the following:
Most American families would like to have mom or dad at home when their kids are little. The polling is clear: Fifty-three percent of married American mothers consider having one parent home and the other parent working full time to be the “ideal” arrangement for kids under age five. The same polling shows that lower, working, and middle class married parents all generally prefer a homemaker-breadwinner division of labor to other arrangements. The only outlier? Wealthy families, who mostly prefer to have both parents working full-time.
Although most ordinary Americans want their babies cared for by a parent at home, many policymakers considering early childhood issues seem single-mindedly focused on government support for paid child care. President Joe Biden, for example, in announcing his (ultimately failed) Build Back Better Act argued it was necessary to spend $225 billion on out-of-home care because “the high cost of child care continues to make it hard for parents—especially women—to work outside the home.”
Interesting. The world, of course, is run by the wealthy, for the wealthy. The woke wealthy. And their ideologies are enforced by useful idiots like Biden, who, for all we know, might be needing his own continence protection if he gets a second term. The ruling class, deliberately of course, gets the problem one hundred and eighty degrees wrong, and effects the recent political preference for “solving” non-problems and ignoring the real issues that concern ordinary people. This is utterly disingenuous. The problem is not that it is too expensive for women to go out to work. It is, rather, too expensive for them not to. Framing is everything, now.
Women-in-the-workforce is one of those classic modern issues where the ideological new left and the venal corporate class form a hitherto-thought-impossible unity ticket.
Fortunately, the freshly-minted Ohio Senator J D Vance, author of the epic The Hillbilly Elegy, has begun working to address this issue, and to re-incentivise parents to stay at home while their children are young. And perhaps even to do a little toilet training while they are about it. Vance is part of the great push-back against Davosism, the re-reset, if you will.
In child care as in everything else, once you let the corporatist State run things, then you are asking for trouble. In particular, you are asking for turbo-charged ideology. In pre-school establishments, for goodness sake. Then they go to school, and you have lost them. For life. It is now a variation on the old Jesuit adage:
‘Give me a child till he is seven years old,’ said St Ignatius Loyola, ‘and I will show you the man.’
https://sourcenews.scot/give-me-a-child-till-he-is-seven-years-old/
Well, we now have a cohort of children who believe in climate catastrophes and the evils of colonialism but who can’t go to the toilet. And a system with trashed parental rights, as the aforementioned Mark Latham often laments. And fights against.
It remains to be seen what impact the ARC will have in the longer term, on both right-of-centre parties and governments, and on the broader ideological battles of our time. Talk fests within echo chambers will do little good when the class that now rules the roost in all of society’s game-changing institutions don’t bother with talk, but rather get on with the core tasks of strategy, evangelisation, infiltration and execution. Mistaking Davos (and the World Economic Forum that runs the annual meet-ups) for a talk fest has been a monumental error by those now meeting in London and their fellow travellers. Team Davos has been “penetrating ze cabinets” since its formation in the 1970s, and has taken over both global governance and the culture that underpins it.
The triumph of just one of the core, universally accepted tenets of the Davos class – radical feminism and the destruction of the version of the family that once held sway – has delivered us, among other things, a generation of children that (apparently) doesn’t know how to use a toilet. Not even a traditional, gendered toilet.
The ARC will have its work cut out. Of course, it is not without irony that, given our scatological topic, its focus is on “responsible citizenship”.
Paul Collits
1 November 2023
Scott Morrison’s there?
The same Scott Morrison who overruled ‘the medical advice’ and precipitated a cascade of Covid vaccination mandates around Australia in 2021?
That Scott Morrison?
See: Why did former Australian PM Scott Morrison overrule advice against compulsory vaccination? https://elizabethhart.substack.com/p/why-did-former-australian-pm-scott
The advisory panel is very insiderish. Take a look!