Has it gone too far? How do we turn this covid juggernaut around? How do we rein in all the mumbo-jumbo voodoo “science” we’ve been lavishly treated to over the last 20 months?
The problem is that it’s never really been about science, or health - but emotion. We like to believe we’re rational beings, but really we human beings are just walking catastrophes of conflicting and complicated emotion.
In many ways, I don’t want that to change. Things would be unbearable if we were ultra-rational, cold, and emotionless. But it’s a Catch-22. We can put our science and data hat on, drop the mother of all common-sense bombs everywhere we go, but it will do us little good. We need to reverse the emotional trends here.
It’s why most of my writing on here is polemic in style. I’m trying to engage both the rational and emotional parts of us, sprinkled with the occasional soupçon of humour.
The problem is that governments, aided by the largely puppet-media, have the upper hand. Big time. We might have the mother of all common-sense and science arguments, and I believe we do, but they have the mother of all emotional arguments; fear.
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” (Frank Herbert, Dune)
Fear engages our deep evolutionary core drivers like almost nothing else. It overrides almost everything else. It can be a really important and useful thing to be a bit afraid.
Ugg : watch out for that sabre-tooth tiger
Ogg : hah! I laugh in the face of dang . . . aaaaaargh!
But fear is not meant to be a permanent state of affairs. It is a vital response to a temporary, immediate, danger. Adrenalin kicks in, we go into a heightened state of alert - and this gives us a bit more of an edge - a better chance of surviving whatever it is that has spooked us. Nor is too much fear a good thing - if we let our fear disable us, if we let it override all of our rationality - then we could be in trouble.
We need just enough fear to do the right thing in the face of a sabre-tooth tiger (probably run). Too much fear and we might be paralysed and unable to flee.
Fear is a great way to manipulate your population. You can get them to do all sorts of things with a steady drip, drip, drip of fear. Things like, oh I don’t know, putting people you’ve been taught to fear and loathe onto trains for a Zyklon-B shower, perhaps? Do I think our governments want to do this kind of thing to the unvaccinated? Not at the moment, no. But they’re using exactly the same kind of emotional manipulation techniques right now that were used back then.
We’ve been taught to fear the virus. We’ve been taught to fear each other as potential sources of disease. And now we’re being taught to fear (and loathe) the unvaccinated.
When did you last hear the message “It’s a serious, but manageable, health problem. Almost all of you will be OK and are really at very low risk”?
Notwithstanding the fact that this statement is actually true - or at least much closer to the truth than government messaging - it’s also the correct thing to do ethically and practically. Sweden’s more level-headed and calm approach has worked far better than the panic-driven insanity of most of the rest of the world.
Instead we’ve had our fear levels kept artificially high - and nothing good will come of that. Indeed, we’re beginning to see lots of bloody awful things happening across the world.
Austria : you can go to work and serve us our food and drinks if you’re unvaccinated - but you can’t join us for a meal afterwards. Fuck off you unclean pig.
OK - I may have mistranslated that last sentence there - my German is not very good.
But notice how the unvaccinated are simultaneously supposed to be a threat - but not enough of a threat to prevent them from waiting on us!
The question isn’t so much about how we turn around some of the nonsense covid “science”, but how we turn around the emotional juggernaut? That, I don’t know.
thanks to the inestimable Ivor Cummins for the Flu D'état quote
This is how I suspect that this will play out, unfortunately: public opinion will only catch up with reality at the point that it becomes glaringly obvious to most that many more people (children?) are being injured by the vaccines and lockdowns than from the dreaded, virtually non-existent disease. The self-inflicted catastrophe will have to come to a head in terms of undeniable injuries and deaths. I don't think anything else is capable of breaking the propaganda induced trance.
In the meantime, the only option we have is to keep patiently and compassionately and humbly educating the few over whom we may have some influence and on the basis of any factual information by which we may have come.
Let's see...A Tommy Lee Jones meme (🤗👍💖), Flu D'etat (😂🤣), Jesus meme (👍🙌). Love your sense and style of humor/wit.
Yes, too much fear is not good for people. I have chronic anxiety. It, not only, is a base cause for many physical ailments, it wreaks your mental health, and makes you cranky, too.