What the Great Cough of Calamity™ meant to me

Over 5 years on and I don’t think I’ve yet fully recovered from Covid. Not that I’ve ever had it. I’ve no idea whether I have or not - and I simply don’t care.

It was the first time I’d become aware of the malevolent and manipulative misinformation machine that existed as a kind of adjunct to ‘government’. This time it was, literally, in your face as they tried to force everyone to wear masks, just one of many unscientific absurdities foisted upon us.

The scale and speed with which the ‘forces of darkness’ were marshalled and levelled against those who had the temerity to question, however slightly, the emerging ‘narrative’ was truly breath-taking.

When you do a transphobia you become used to the pile-on from the crazies who think that simply feeling you are a woman is sufficient to make you one. The covid farce, however, was an institutional pile-on. It was as if all of the important structures in society had become the equivalent of some weird gender-crazed loon telling TERFs to suck their trans dick and trying to get you cancelled for hatred¹.

It really was that crazy.

On the one hand it was very effective and you got a huge number of people wilfully participating in the insanity. On the other, it was a disaster for those ‘forces of darkness’ because it opened the eyes of far too many to the gross and grotesque manipulative malevolence festering away hitherto largely unseen like a malignant tumour at the heart of our society.

Even if it was all ‘innocent’ and done in good faith thinking that it was necessary to protect people from the scourge of Covid it made us realize just how powerful and pervasive this manipulative misinformation machine really was. And we began to wonder where else? Where else had we been manipulated in ways we didn’t realize?

This may be the lasting legacy of Covid. Not its effect on health, but in a level of mistrust about how we are governed and the institutions behind it. There’s really no going back is there, when a betrayal this egregious is laid bare?

We were betrayed at almost every level by our governments, our media, our institutions, our corporations, and our health services. What remains for many (myself included) is now a level of distrust that cannot be soothed away with the usual political platitudes we’ve become accustomed to from our ‘great and good’.

Many may not even have gotten to the point of articulating that mistrust, but they sure feel it in their bones, so to speak.

I suppose I would say that my previous inclination had been to have a default assumption of trust. Sometimes I would be surprised to learn I had been lied to, on occasion. On this operating assumption the surprise is in the occasional betrayal.

It’s the opposite of this now. My default assumption is one of distrust and my surprise is when I find they’ve been telling the truth.

This betrayal of trust is everywhere now. Here in the UK you’ve got the mother who, in a moment of emotion, posted an unpleasant (but not illegal) tweet expressing her opinion. She deleted this after 4 hours. She’s in jail whilst some rapists have walked free.

It’s sick. It’s disgusting. And it’s a betrayal of our trust and our values.

This is relevant because the purpose of her prosecution was not to punish some terrible crime, but to send a message to others. It was our justice system being used as a propaganda tool. An exercise, by the machine, in manipulation.

I was originally going to do another review of the covid-crazy. There was nothing they got right. I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic here. There is nothing I can think of, from all the major planks of the official ‘covid narrative’, that they got right.

And, of course, because of that, nothing they did worked. We wasted something like £500 billion on stuff that was a complete waste of time².

I was going to list them all - point by point - and write a short paragraph on each. But I realized it would turn into a horrendously long post were I to do that. The scale of the deception and manipulation is something that, even now, I can’t properly process.

Lockdowns, fomite transmission, asymptomatic transmission, test and trace, masks, business and school closures, online ‘education’, social distancing, plastic screens, one way systems in shops, the purchase of only essential items, potential alternative treatments, vaccine safety, vaccine effectiveness, the severity of the disease itself, . . . and more

They weren’t right on any of this stuff.

Not a single fucking thing. I am beyond angry, if I’m honest. The scale of deception and outright lying was truly off the charts.

There are too many examples of fuckwittery to choose from. From governments and institutions telling us the ‘safest’ sex positions (did they consult the Pharma Sutra, one wonders?) to being told not to play board games at Christmas because of the danger they posed, we reached a level of screaming madness that dwarfed (am I allowed to use that word? Sorry if it offends any person of restricted growth³) anything ever written by Monty Python.

It was all a game, of course. A game to keep us continually ‘aware’ of the supposedly existential threat we faced.

A threat that turned out, in the final analysis, to be not that much more consequential than a bad flu.

OMG, said the Undersecretary for Pyjama Stitching, there’s a bad flu going round. We’re going to need £500 billion to do stuff that doesn’t make sense and won’t work.

Which just about sums it all up.

My own Christian (very lapsed Catholic) heritage and upbringing would suggest that, even in extremis, one should try to emulate Josh himself and petition “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do”.

Well he’s a better man than me I guess. There’s no real forgiveness from me - and there never likely will be.

But I do think they don’t know what they have done.

1. It is not, obviously, hatred to want to punch a TERF in the face, or to encourage others to do it, or to imply that one is going to force their trans dick on them. Oh no - that’s all perfectly normal and decent behaviour and thinking that cannot even be remotely compared to the absolutely vile and vicious hatred implicit in thinking that sex may be binary and immutable.

2. Just to give you some idea of how much this is I like to translate these figures into PITY - personal individual tax years. The median annual salary in the UK is about £37k and the tax on that comes to about £7k a year. In other words, you need around 70 million people earning that salary working for an entire year to pay for it.

3. PORG’s were first introduced by the wonderful Tom Sharpe