There was a time during ‘covid’ when I was beginning to think there was a group of individuals in some secret chamber somewhere who gathered every week to have a competition.
What unhinged nonsense can we get them to believe/accept this week?
Each week’s winner would, presumably, be awarded a hefty number of Pfizer shares.
And so, with nary a grumble, people in the UK would sit with other people in a pub or restaurant and eat, laugh and make merry - but when they stood up they would put a mask on.
You can well imagine this coterie of hypothetical manipulators having a right old laugh at everyone’s expense.
I can’t believe we got them to do that!
I can’t believe it either. ‘We’ went along with it. Real people, presumably possessed of at least some moderate capability of thought, did this.
This was only one of many, many similar examples of almost pathological stupidity that we witnessed.
The correct response to all of this muppetry, of course, would probably have been to laugh and to tell the eejits to go boil their heads. If we’d all done that, and supported one another, none of the nonsense would have lasted more than a day.
‘Covid’ turned ‘us’ into the biggest bunch of muppets in history.
The muppetry, today, is everywhere and all-pervasive, and not just centred on ‘covid’. For example, it would seem that more than just a tiny minority of eccentric loons amongst us, really do, without the slightest hint of apparent irony or doubt, believe that anyone who identifies as a woman actually IS a woman. Likewise, a significant number of people think that the sex binary was ‘invented’ in the 17th or 18th century as a way to ‘oppress’ the colonized and the noble POAH (People of Alternative Hue).
How, and when, did the human race become this fucking stupid?
I really don’t know how to take a lot of ‘hot-button’ issues today seriously. They represent a nutty picture of the world that has been badly misplaced in a frame of seriousness.
It’s all a bit outlandish, and seems to be getting increasingly so as we’re told we should be living in ‘15 minute’ cities, or eating crickets, or as we struggle to remember what sodding pronoun the blue-haired weirdo in the next cubicle is using today.
When did everything get so ineffably weird?
I don’t think it’s all down to GOG syndrome (Grumpy Old Git syndrome) - although that might be a factor. There is a tendency, well documented in history, for the older generation to despair at the degeneracy and licentiousness of the yoof.
This is more than that though. A significant number of people today seem to adhere to ideas that are just shit. And more than just merely shit, but dumb. Dumber than a bowl of porridge.
A while back I wrote about a physicist who bemoaned the fact that lecture halls weren’t “designed” with people like her in mind. What is she? A fucking giraffe?
What’s the correct response to this kind of buffoonery, this pathological muppetry?
If I tried to take it seriously (on an intellectual level) I’d only be pretending to do so. I’d be putting it all in a ‘serious’ frame. Framing things as ‘serious’ is a good tactic to hide the muppetry. Here’s a couple more additions to my forthcoming “Woke Dictionary”
Antifa : angry morons
Critical Race Theorists : angry morons with a bigger vocabulary
Some issues are indeed serious. The ‘correct’ framing of the Russia vs Ukraine spat, at least according to our media, is psycho Putin dictator massacres noble gentle Ukrainians in unprovoked act of aggression.
It is serious and I’m not going to even pretend to know what it’s ‘really’ all about and whether Putin is really as monstrous as claimed (quite possibly) - but one thing I do know is that we in the ‘west’ are not riding a particularly high horse here
It wasn’t all that long ago when we invaded another country - one that we didn’t even share a border with - because of the assumed existence of WMD’s (which turned out to be Weapons of Media Delusion).
So the basic principle of invading another country to protect ourselves against some hypothetical threat is one we agree with. We agree, then, or ought to, that Putin was well within his rights to invade another country if he (or the government) decided it was a matter of national security. We did that very same thing. And decided it was well within our rights to do so.
It’s all in the framing. We did exactly the same thing as Russia is doing right now - but the framing was a bit different, see, so that made what we did ‘good’ and what Putin is doing ‘bad’.
I’m well aware that I often ‘overdo’ things in the pursuit of a laugh, or even a mild chuckle. I’m well aware that much of my writing is not ‘professional’. Much of it is not even particularly ‘deep’, either. But I believe we’re making a mistake when we choose to give some of these ‘woke’ ideas a serious framing.
The question of appropriate ‘framing’ is a very serious one, however. Governments are already putting in place all the mechanisms and ‘persuasions’ to be able to ‘frame’ anything as they wish and to stop others from re-framing things more appropriately. Governments are giving themselves the power to determine what is, and isn’t, misinformation and to be able to stop the naughty stuff, the ‘bad’ information they don’t like. They want to control the frame - the Overton window, if you like - so that we merely have the illusion of free speech.
I sometimes get the impression that the Overton window has shifted so much these days, I’m staring at the bloody wall.
Talk freely about anything as long as it’s within this beautiful frame we’ve carved out for you.
But true freedom of speech depends on the ability to choose our own framing and to go outside the frames others choose.
If we allow them to restrict our ability to frame a discussion in any way we see fit, if we allow them to follow-through with their tyrannical goals of controlling the frame, we’re going to be living with the consequences of a most unpleasant and unedifying follow-through.
As a final note, I apologize for my lack of responses to comments over the last week or so. A big thank you to everyone who linked to various musical suggestions. It’s awesome to hear some new and great music and performances. So, because I’ve talked about horses, here’s Jethro Tull’s song Heavy Horses which provides a nice lyrical contrast to some of the ‘poetry’ of the lyrics of today
Iron-clad feather-feet pounding the dust
An October's day, towards evening
Sweat embossed veins standing proud to the plough
Salt on a deep chest seasoningLast of the line at an honest day's toil
Turning the deep sod under
Flint at the fetlock, chasing the bone
Flies at the nostrils plunder.
Please keep on overjoying us by overly overdoing the Overton window.
To add, that Influenza, now completely MIA, which the medical gods totally eradicated when they invented Covid. No serious questioning from the medical industry or citizenry on that. Their logic seems to lead them to think masks must 'work' cuz the flu is gone. Don't underestimate the effect of injected prion disease.