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by stickdog99 » Sat Feb 20, 2021 12:42 pm
by Belligerent Savant » Sat Feb 20, 2021 1:33 pm
by JackRiddler » Sat Feb 20, 2021 3:51 pm
architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk
Cui Bono? The COVID-19 ‘Conspiracy’
Simon Elmer
Architects for Social Housing
FEBRUARY 19, 2021
https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.u ... onspiracy/
by stickdog99 » Sat Feb 20, 2021 4:51 pm
by dada » Sat Feb 20, 2021 5:57 pm
by stickdog99 » Sat Feb 20, 2021 6:12 pm
by JackRiddler » Sat Feb 20, 2021 6:41 pm
stickdog99 » Sat Feb 20, 2021 3:51 pm wrote:In my humble opinion, COVID hysteria has been quasi-religiously indoctrinated in almost all of my friends and acquaintances.
If I ever make even the slightest suggestion that the lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, and even biometric vaccination status "cures" may have costs and risks that exceed their benefits, my suggestions are treated as the orthodox treat religious heresy. I am a heretic and my views are wrongthink that cannot even be countenanced, much less considered rationally.
I am trying to understand this phenomenon from a sociological perspective. Can someone explain to me how less than a year of indoctrination can get otherwise rational adults to equate healthy people wearing masks at all times, refusing all physical contact with anyone who does not reside in their home, not visiting their loved ones, and having their rights severely restricted if they don't rush to be injected with an experimental vaccine with saintliness?
And further to equate anyone who so much as questions any of these creeds as not only an irredeemable mortal sinner, but also a dangerous heretic who should be burnt at the stake?
How did this happen? Is it because of the intense politicization of this issue in the USA, in which any questioning of COVID public policies is equated with Trumpophilia? Or is it simply because Americans love to self-righteously judge others for not adhering to the same religious rituals that they adhere to? Or what? Our unquestioning worship of authoritative consensus? Can anybody help me to understand this?
by Belligerent Savant » Sat Feb 20, 2021 6:57 pm
I myself have trouble controlling my strong tendency to angry sarcasm.
I think the right moment for a public movement that cracks this shell is coming soon -- as even the cooked numbers drop, somewhere between April and the summer.
Belligerent Savant » Tue Dec 01, 2020 12:11 am wrote:.
None of this touches on the other LARGE problem, surely to be addressed well after-the-fact: the abundance of PLASTIC discarded due to all this PPE in circulation. The environment can ill-afford a surplus of plastics, even without the proliferation of PPE (not to mention the plastic fibers inhaled when wearing a mask -- over time, this will increase the potential for chronic lung-related issues).
by dada » Sat Feb 20, 2021 7:09 pm
by stickdog99 » Sat Feb 20, 2021 7:10 pm
JackRiddler » 20 Feb 2021 19:51 wrote:.
It's long and you should read it.architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk
Cui Bono? The COVID-19 ‘Conspiracy’
Simon Elmer
Architects for Social Housing
FEBRUARY 19, 2021
https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.u ... onspiracy/
- Point is, lockdown policies, certainly the UK version, have not affected death rates or spread in comparison to places that have not implemented them. The listing of UK lockdown policies and their irrationality at the start is awesome.
- Lockdown policies are the basis for an emergent biosecurity state and constitute a form of top-down revolution toward what is structurally a right-wing totalitarian state. This is how the policies make sense. The left (I'd say the majority of 'the left' currently) is in complete denial (I'd say motivated by fear) and successfully enlisted in support.
- Spoiler: 'Cui bono' is not the right question. It leads to construction of cabals that may exist, but cannot alone accomplish the coordination of separate actors and agencies seen converging on the lockdown policies and retooling everything for the emergent biosecurity state. It also encourages phantom constructs like how this is all a leftist plot or the imposition of 'communism' --by the billionaires!
- GREAT early section dissecting Adam Curtis as an example of a quasi-official, celebrated propagandist constructing exactly the kind of 'conspiracy theory' that is abjured and attacked as such whenever it deviates from official line. The upshot of Curtis's work is that you, the masses, are mere clay for the handful of intellectual elite manipulators to shape at will, and basically both stupid and helpless.
(On Curtis, I strongly recommend the Russian couple taking apart his work this week on their podcast: This link should work for Immigrants as a Weapon No. 7, even if you're not logged in/subscribed.)
- WHY is the right question, because it leads to an understanding of the political and economic incentives that serve as a universal guide that can coordinate the awesome institutional convergences that a mere cabal cannot. The surprising name for this is capital seeking growth outlets in the present state of development, at a time widely understood as global resource war.
- Has a tendency in my opinion to understate real Covid impact, but not consistently or inexcusably. Caveats not stated here may apply. I haven't seen a better big-picture outline.
- To all who are still on board with the Covid panic: I'm not going to accuse you of anything. Impacts are real, and they are disproportionate exactly where we would expect: among those who are also being disproportionately impacted by the lockdown measures! But let's revisit this in April, once even the pumped-up numbers can no longer justify these measures, which are already obviously irrational unless they're understood as building a biosecurity state.
.
by JackRiddler » Sat Feb 20, 2021 7:22 pm
Thanks for this article. It does quite a bit to answer the questions I was asking. I highly recommend it to anybody with the time to read it in its entirety.
Table of Contents
The Conspiracy Paradox
The Power of Nightmares
Capitalising on the Crisis
Disruption and Redeployment
The Emerging Ideology
Biosecurity as Cultic Practice
The Authoritarian State
Brave New World
The Time Given to Us
Hegel remarks somewhere that the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings with the fall of night. By this he meant that history is always written in retrospect about an already realised world. In 1940, no-one could know what every school-child knew in 1945: who won the Second World War. In five years’ time, perhaps, everyone will know the outcome of the current revolution in Western capitalism. But by then it will be too late. The owl of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, will be on the wing, and we will be left in the darkness. But if we are to keep the light of knowledge burning in her lamp, we can at least try to awaken from the sleep of reason into which we have fallen, and try to anticipate what monsters will emerge from the dark.
We are approaching the first anniversary of the coronavirus crisis in the UK, and more and more people — on the Twitter account of the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, in the Facebook pages set up to share censored interviews with scientists, in the online platforms not yet shut down for discussing the evidence against lockdown, in the illegal meetings of friends in the homes of the people that host them, in the thousands of discussions and exchanges that happen at every act of resistance, every demonstration, every march — know that this crisis has been manufactured. We know now that the emergency measures taken in response to this ‘unprecedented’ crisis have been in place for years, waiting to be put into action. We know that contracts for the campaign of propaganda were signed with PR firms weeks before the first lockdown. We know that, in April 2020, the Cabinet Office approved over £216 million for advertising on what it called the ‘COVID-19 Campaign 20/21’. We know that the criteria for attributing deaths to COVID-19 were changed by legislation back in March to exaggerate the official number of fatalities. We know that 95 per cent of the deaths attributed to the disease were of people with pre-existing health conditions like cancer, dementia, heart disease or diabetes. We know that 84 per cent were over 70 years of age, and that the average age of those whose deaths are attributed to COVID-19 is the average age of death in the UK. We know that, a year into this so-called ‘pandemic’, around 600 patients under the age of 60 without a pre-existing health condition have had their deaths in English hospitals attributed to COVID-19. We know that, in April last year, the World Health Organisation issued instructions to medical practitioners that, if COVID-19 is merely the ‘suspected’ or ‘probable’ or ‘assumed’ cause of death, it must always be recorded as the ‘underlying cause’ on death certificates, whether this is ‘considered medically correct or not.’ We know that the WHO’s recommendations on the use of face masks by the public changed in June following political lobbying by the governments of, among other countries, the UK, and that even then it was primarily to encourage compliance with other restrictions on our rights and freedoms. We know that the first and only randomised control trial of the effectiveness of face masks in stopping coronavirus transmission, and which was rejected by several leading medical journals, when finally published reported ‘statistically negligible’ benefits. We know that, for a long time, the UK Government deliberately exaggerated the number of so-called ‘COVID-19 deaths’ by including anyone who has tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, no matter how long afterwards they died and of what illness. We know that, even now, anyone who tests positive within 28 days of their death is still recorded as a ‘COVID death’. We know that, according to the WHO, 30 per cent of infections, even in high GDP countries like the UK, are contracted in medical facilities, meaning anyone dying in a UK hospital has an equivalent chance of being designated a ‘COVID death’. We know that, even with the withdrawal of medical care for nearly 68 million people for the best part of a year, the age-adjusted mortality rate in 2020 was the highest in only 12 years, and that the population fatality rate from the coronavirus ‘epidemic’ is equivalent to a bad season of influenza. We know that, as even these inaccurately identified deaths have fallen, the Government has turned to the promotion of RT-PCR tests for the virus that, according to its own advisors at SAGE, have a false-positive rate higher than the percentage of the UK population testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 with these tests. We know that 80 per cent of infections with SARS-CoV-2 are asymptomatic, and therefore calling them ‘cases’ is medically inaccurate. We know from a study of nearly 10 million residents in Wuhan, the epicentre of the infection in China, that asymptomatic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is statistically non-existent. We have known for the past 55 years that at least four coronaviruses circulate freely in UK on a seasonal basis, providing prior immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in around 30 per cent of the population before it reached these shores. We know that any RT-PCR test reliant on encoding the spike protein unique to coronaviruses can detect as SARS-CoV-2 anyone having a common cold from other coronaviruses at the time of sampling. We know that, despite this, the governments of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are using these meaningless statistics to impose tiered lockdowns across the UK, in further violation of our human rights and civil liberties. We know that this is being done under legislation that only authorises such actions when justified by medical evidence that has not been produced for Parliament but merely eluded to in press conferences. We know that the predictions of escalating infections and increased numbers of deaths by senior medical figures employed by the Government have been shown time and again to be wildly inaccurate fabrications based on predictive models challenged by the most eminent scientists around the world. We know that, as of publication, over 351 coronavirus-justified Statutory Instruments have been made into law without a draft being presented to Parliament in advance for debate, without medical or other proof being provided of their justification or proportionality, and without an assessment being made of their impact, and that every one of these pieces of legislation requiring it has been rubber stamped in retrospect by virtual sittings of that Parliament. We know that £22 billion of public monies has been awarded in contracts without prior competitive tender to privately-owned companies with financial links to members of Parliament, the Government and their business colleagues. We know that more and more of the functions of the state are being outsourced to private companies unaccountable to the public that provides the money with which they are paid. We know that, according to the World Bank, the coronavirus-justified restrictions imposed on the UK population since March 2020 have cost the country £280 billion, the equivalent of £4,112 for every man, woman and child in the UK. We know that, in contrast, the wealth of the world’s 2,200-plus billionaires increased by 20 per cent and US$1.9 trillion in 2020, more than in any previous year in history. We know that, by the end of 2020, over a quarter of a billion people across the globe were severely malnourished as a result of coronavirus-justified restrictions. We know that, under the cloak of this crisis, the Government and its financial partners have massively expanded the surveillance, monitoring and control of UK citizens through regulations, programmes and technologies that are implementing the UK biosecurity state. We know that, at the peak of deaths attributed to COVID-19 in April, more than 40 per cent of acute care beds in NHS hospitals were unoccupied. We know there is strong evidence that, at a conservative estimate, at least half the 80,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in 2020 were caused by lockdown restrictions that denied UK citizens emergency, elective, social and community care in order to free up hospital beds for an epidemic that was never in danger of arriving. We know that the renewal of lockdown over the winter of 2020-2021 is killing thousands more. We know that this lockdown was decided back in July, before the manufactured rise in so-called ‘cases’ consequent upon a huge rise in RT-PCR tests producing an even greater rise in false positives. We know that over the next five years, hundreds of thousands more people in the UK will fall into poverty, unemployment, bankruptcy and despair that will shorten their lives by many tens of thousands of years because of restrictions justified by these manufactured figures. We know that, although the GDP of the UK is rising slowly back to pre-crisis levels, the restrictions that continue to be imposed on the population are redistributing wealth from the public purse into the pockets of the rich and the powerful on a scale never before seen even in the UK. We know that the mental health of millions of UK citizens is being deliberately and systematically attacked through Government-funded campaigns of terrorism, fearmongering and lies designed to reduce the population to compliance, obedience, resignation and despair. We know that attempts at suicide and self-harm, particularly among British children, are increasing. We know that the fines for the newly-created crimes of not wearing a mask, meeting friends or leaving our home without permission have been raised and will continue to be raised to levels sufficient to financially ruin anyone who disobeys Government regulations. We know that non-compliance with certain coronavirus-justified Regulations can now be punished with up to 10 years in prison. We know that the Government has looked at the legal barriers to making vaccination compulsory for a disease with a fatality rate of 0.23 per cent across the population and 0.05 per cent for those under 70, and has not ruled out making taking such a vaccine a condition of access to public life. We know that UK police forces are being given more power with reduced accountability to enforce these regulations with increased brutality and greater impunity from prosecution. We know that the legal profession, the media, the press, academia, the medical profession, the pharmaceutical industry, the financial and banking sector, the passenger transport industry, the civil service, the security services, the armed forces and every other public institution is collaborating in affecting the revolution of the UK into a biosecurity state. We know that this state is being implemented through the private sector as much as through the public sector, with the information technology industry, the healthcare industry, the education industry, the tourism industry, the hospitality industry and the retail industry all being compelled by coronavirus-justified regulations to enforce compliance with the technologies and programmes of the biosecurity state as a condition of using their services. We know that these technologies will not stop there, but under the guise of monitoring and protecting our biosecurity, not only from SARS-CoV-2 but from any other virus designated a threat to public health in the future, are penetrating and influencing every aspect of our private life, biological existence and social behaviour.
We know all this and more. But the question more and more people are now asking is: why? Why is this being done, and to what end? Of what benefit, and to whose benefit, is the impoverishment of the population of the UK and most other Western liberal democracies around the world? Why would the governments of capitalist economies deliberately set out to bankrupt millions of small businesses and drive tens of millions of workers into unemployment and destitution? And what, if anything, can we do to resist it? This article is my attempt to respond to these questions, although not necessarily by answering them.
1. The Conspiracy Paradox
Cui bono, in Latin, means ‘to whom is it a benefit?’, or more colloquially ‘who benefits?’ It was a phrase associated with the Roman consul, Lucius Cassius, known in the Republic as an honest and wise judge, who when trying to identify the perpetrator of a crime always asked who stood to gain from it being perpetrated. Unsurprisingly, it’s a question that is being asked with greater insistence as the evidence of the crimes committed under the cloak of the coronavirus crisis mounts up, and the hitherto hegemonic facade of deception is beginning to crack. But there is still a barrier to the wall of lies behind it being torn down, and that is the question of who could possible benefit from the destruction coronavirus-justified restrictions are inflicting on the populations on which they are being imposed by their governments, justified by their media and enforced by their police and security forces.
On the one hand, the question seems almost childishly naïve, like asking why the New Labour Government of Tony Blair fabricated the so-called ‘dodgy’ dossier that justified the UK forming a coalition with the US to invade Iraq on the threat of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that never existed. The fifth largest oil reserves in the world is the short and simple answer. But that answer, which every school child in the UK today knows, was apparently sufficiently unknown — or insufficiently believed — by the British public in 2003 to stop the UK Government and media collaborating to take us into one of the most disastrous military invasions in recent history. I’ve no doubt that in a decade the children of Britain will know why they spend their days masked before an Apple computer, have to update their biometric data into an Android phone every week, have everything they read censored by Facebook and everything they write monitored by Twitter, everywhere they go recorded by Google, and everything they earn and buy overseen and approved by Amazon; but by then it will be too late. We need to know now.
And yet, despite the apparent obviousness of the answer, it is not easy to put into words that everyone can understand and accept. The reason for this, as I want to show in this article, is because it is the wrong question. The current framing of this question offers only two responses, and in doing so has successfully divided the country into two hugely unequal camps. Either we are, in reality, facing a civilisation-threatening virus to which our governments are responding with degrees of incompetence and opportunism but to a genuine and real threat to public health; or the whole thing has been manufactured by a conspiracy of powerful individuals and organisations whose names and initials we are all familiar with by now, and whose immense wealth and influence enables them to grind the organ to which our various governments are dancing.
I don’t believe either of these answers to be correct. I have spent the past year showing why the statistical data, medical reports and coronavirus-justified legislation do not corroborate the veracity of the first answer. But I also don’t believe that the refusal to believe this blatant lie means believing the easily-dismissed second answer that there must — therefore — exist a conspiracy of political, economic and technological powers which have either manufactured this deadly virus in a secret lab in Wuhan or fabricated the effects of a virus whose genome still hasn’t been sequenced. On the contrary, I believe it is this binary response — a deadly virus or an even deadlier conspiracy, neither of which is supported by what we know about the world in the early Twenty-first Century — that has stopped the truth about this crisis appearing to those who are looking for it.
My answer to the question — Cui bono? — rests on a paradox. Its initial premise is a widely-accepted one: that, rather than explaining this crisis, the various conspiracy theories about COVID-19 — like most conspiracy theories — are a product of this crisis. But the paradox I derive from this, which draws attention to what we mean by a ‘product’, is less commonly proposed: that, far from undermining the ideological hegemony of the official narrative about COVID-19, these conspiracy theories are a crucial part of the construction of that hegemony. It is not by examining their claims, therefore, but rather their functions — beginning with the question of whom they benefit — that we can begin to understand what is happening, how it is happening and, maybe, why it is happening.
2. The Power of Nightmares
I want to begin by challenging the explanatory power of conspiracy theories in general, with the hope that, by doing so, it will undermine the foundation on which the coronavirus crisis has been constructed. The best place to start is with one of the most widely accepted and institutionally supported propagator of conspiracy theories, Adam Curtis. So embedded are his theories in our culture that I imagine most people would not regard him as a conspiracy theorist, a term they would reserve for believers in the ‘Illuminati’ or a ‘flat-earth’. But the reduction of all conspiracy theories to occult or scientifically-disproved beliefs is part of the function of what might be called the ‘discourse’ of conspiracy theory that is increasingly being used to dismiss all ideas and beliefs not sanctioned by the institutions of the state, whether political, scientific, religious or cultural. It has always struck me as curious that, despite the content of his numerous and award-winning television programmes — all of which, on the face of it, contradict and undermine what such institutions tell us about the world and recent historical events — rather than being banned or censored or marginalised are available on an almost permanent basis on mainstream broadcasting platforms like the BBC, where they are categorised as ‘documentaries’ and never bracketed with other ‘conspiracy theories’. This has led me to ask, Cui bono? — who benefits from the production, televising, and availability of these apparently subversive accounts of everything from the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the causes of the Iraq War to the power of the media and the 2008 financial crisis.
What all of Curtis’s accounts share in common is this: that history is made by a small group of individuals in positions of political and corporate power, usually putting into practice ideas he traces back to theoretical concepts developed years earlier by intellectuals and only later made possible by advances in technology. It’s a persuasive model of history whose theoretical simplicity is concealed behind the myriad of intuitive and tenuous connections Curtis draws between public and private organisations, whether Governments or corporations, and the secret dealings of their leaders. Indeed, his latest series, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, which is available to view on the BBC now, is an account of the rise of conspiracy theories told through barely articulated connections between individuals and events driven or guided by never identified forces. Significantly, though, over the more than 8 hours of its 6 episodes, the coronavirus crisis warrants only the briefest of mentions 10 minutes from the end, where Curtis merely repeats the standard liberal response about COVID-19 exacerbating inequalities in Western democracies. Some conspiracy theories, it seems, are off-bounds even to a BBC producer.
In this respect, although more credible than, say, Hitler’s conspiracy of Jewish bankers for Bolshevism, Curtis’s histories, in both their theoretical model of change and in the methodology of their telling, with archive footage bringing a veneer of history to historically meaningless generalisations, are exemplary of conspiracy theories in general. Power is located in the hands of a few individuals, who are limited to the intellectuals and mavericks who formulate the ideas, the scientists and engineers who develop the technology that allows those ideas to be realised, the CEOs and bankers who fund their implementation or the politicians and generals who put them into practice. Like the old histories of kings and queens and the wars they started, this is a history of the elite. The masses appear only as the object of their manipulations, the foot-soldiers they send to war, the victims they killed, and the civilians back home who waved their national flags and corporate logos and cheered. What this model of history does is two things.
First, such immense power and influence is attributed to this elite that they are depicted as more than kings, almost as gods, employing all the rapidly-evolving power of technology, whether that’s computers, robotics, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, quantum computing or the military hardware they drive. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is the title of Curtis’s 3-part film, televised on the BBC in 2011, about the power of computers to create our perception of the world. Second, and as a consequence of this depiction, the rest of us, the masses of Western democracies, are depicted not only as powerless but also as drained by this depiction of any historical agency whatsoever. The spectacle of our own impotence in the face of the depicted nexus of political, military and technological power becomes the object of filmic consumption. And as the German critic, Walter Benjamin, wrote of the spectacle of war under fascism, our alienation from ourselves has reached such a degree that even the depiction of the annihilation of our agency is now experienced as an aesthetic pleasure. Everything is Going According to Plan is the title of Curtis’s 2013 film about how technocrats and global corporations have established an ultraconservative norm behind the fake, enchanting prison of the internet.
This, I believe, is why Curtis’s otherwise so traumatic accounts of our manufactured impotence are so popular, so available for viewing on mainstream media platforms that otherwise refuse to report on what is happening in the world, so readily consumed by a UK public otherwise indifferent to the suffering our Government inflicts on other countries and peoples, and why they have become the primary model by which the world is now explained and understood. In a choice between being told that we are flies to the wanton boys running the world and blank incomprehension at the vast and terrifying complexity of that world, it seems we overwhelmingly prefer the first story for our evening’s television. The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear is the title of another 3-part film, televised on the BBC in 2004, about how the US created a mythical enemy out of Islam in order to drum up global support for its military interventions in the oil-rich Middle East. So what’s wrong with this model of history, and what does it have to tell us about the latest incomprehensible event by which we are being terrorised into apathy and compliance?
CONTINUED HERE
architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk
Cui Bono? The COVID-19 ‘Conspiracy’
Simon Elmer
Architects for Social Housing
FEBRUARY 19, 2021
https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.u ... onspiracy/
- Point is, lockdown policies, certainly the UK version, have not affected death rates or spread in comparison to places that have not implemented them. The listing of UK lockdown policies and their irrationality at the start is awesome.
- Lockdown policies are the basis for an emergent biosecurity state and constitute a form of top-down revolution toward what is structurally a right-wing totalitarian state. This is how the policies make sense. The left (I'd say the majority of 'the left' currently) is in complete denial (I'd say motivated by fear) and successfully enlisted in support.
- Spoiler: 'Cui bono' is not the right question. It leads to construction of cabals that may exist, but cannot alone accomplish the coordination of separate actors and agencies seen converging on the lockdown policies and retooling everything for the emergent biosecurity state. It also encourages phantom constructs like how this is all a leftist plot or the imposition of 'communism' --by the billionaires!
- GREAT early section dissecting Adam Curtis as an example of a quasi-official, celebrated propagandist constructing exactly the kind of 'conspiracy theory' that is abjured and attacked as such whenever it deviates from official line. The upshot of Curtis's work is that you, the masses, are mere clay for the handful of intellectual elite manipulators to shape at will, and basically both stupid and helpless.
(On Curtis, I strongly recommend the Russian couple taking apart his work this week on their podcast: This link should work for Immigrants as a Weapon No. 7, even if you're not logged in/subscribed.)
- WHY is the right question, because it leads to an understanding of the political and economic incentives that serve as a universal guide that can coordinate the awesome institutional convergences that a mere cabal cannot. The surprising name for this is capital seeking growth outlets in the present state of development, at a time widely understood as global resource war.
- Has a tendency in my opinion to understate real Covid impact, but not consistently or inexcusably. Caveats not stated here may apply. I haven't seen a better big-picture outline.
- To all who are still on board with the Covid panic: I'm not going to accuse you of anything. Impacts are real, and they are disproportionate exactly where we would expect: among those who are also being disproportionately impacted by the lockdown measures! But let's revisit this in April, once even the pumped-up numbers can no longer justify these measures, which are already obviously irrational unless they're understood as building a biosecurity state.
.
by stickdog99 » Sat Feb 20, 2021 7:27 pm
JackRiddler » 20 Feb 2021 22:41 wrote:stickdog99 » Sat Feb 20, 2021 3:51 pm wrote:In my humble opinion, COVID hysteria has been quasi-religiously indoctrinated in almost all of my friends and acquaintances.
If I ever make even the slightest suggestion that the lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, and even biometric vaccination status "cures" may have costs and risks that exceed their benefits, my suggestions are treated as the orthodox treat religious heresy. I am a heretic and my views are wrongthink that cannot even be countenanced, much less considered rationally.
I am trying to understand this phenomenon from a sociological perspective. Can someone explain to me how less than a year of indoctrination can get otherwise rational adults to equate healthy people wearing masks at all times, refusing all physical contact with anyone who does not reside in their home, not visiting their loved ones, and having their rights severely restricted if they don't rush to be injected with an experimental vaccine with saintliness?
And further to equate anyone who so much as questions any of these creeds as not only an irredeemable mortal sinner, but also a dangerous heretic who should be burnt at the stake?
How did this happen? Is it because of the intense politicization of this issue in the USA, in which any questioning of COVID public policies is equated with Trumpophilia? Or is it simply because Americans love to self-righteously judge others for not adhering to the same religious rituals that they adhere to? Or what? Our unquestioning worship of authoritative consensus? Can anybody help me to understand this?
Yes. Extremely well-put.
I'd argue for a combination of several very well-placed and impactful psycho-political appeals and manipulations, which I won't all list here because it would double the length of the following. And in some cases the manipulators have no idea they are manipulating.
And these appeals combine with fear: Fear of causing death to loved ones (a trauma so extreme that no risk seems acceptable), or to strangers (who will more likely be in disadvantaged groups or trapped in the "essential" forced- labor pool). Fear of the virus itself -- especially among those genuinely at risk! (And what should I say to you, since some of you are here? It's okay.) Germaphobia generally, don't underestimate it. I've always been amazed by it, but also must acknowledge it's got a rational and urgent basis for many who suffer from it.
Fear of questioning expert science with one's own mere common sense (even when some of the biggest names in the relevant sciences have done so). Fear of falling out of place with a general consensus that brooks no contradiction (bringing up the tension between thinking they are body-snatched or you are crazy).
And, of course, fear of being screwed, tainted, excluded, or branded. Fear of being accused, by others or by the state. Fear of being assigned to the wrong political camp. Fear of helping a genuinely bad political camp that flies anti-mask as one of their various flags.
...approximately in the above order...
Fear + cognitive dissonance, so people reinforce themselves in the faith.
I think it's very important to acknowledge that exactly what you are writing has happened, and that many people thinking rationally, or thinking rationally about everything other than this, are honest, sincere, not simply stupid but under a sway for which they should not be blamed. You know who definitely should not be blamed? Practicing health professionals, where there has been a real high toll, and a trauma.
The "sheeple" approach is definitely the dumbest tactic to take in this situation. Denigrating people, I believe still at this stage, only hardens them in their views. On this point I've been in conflict with some people who think as we do. Of course I myself have trouble controlling my strong tendency to angry sarcasm.
I am also lucky that several people around me who were initially just as convinced have come to see it much the same way as we do, on their own. And I think the right moment for a public movement that cracks this shell is coming soon -- as even the cooked numbers drop, somewhere between April and the summer. As the article argues, there may never be another opportunity.
And the uncertainty still is very high. There's no 100 percent bet to make here, even if it's been looking more certain by the day. There is a greater than minimal chance we can all be wrong, or so it could have seemed until recently. (Even as we the new normal took further hold, I know.) Or, genuinely random outcomes can still bring a real new variant, or a genuine long-term disease that hits a much larger population than can be shown for "long-term Covid" or "Covid reinfection" so far.
Which the motherfuckers are going to say no matter what happens. The only absolute certainty for me at this point is that enough elements of the state-corporate-org beast in most of "the West" have seized on the opportunity with every tentacle to impose and continuously expand a pre-existing and evolving agenda that is timely for the political-economic-historic reality as they see it, or to adapt to and advance the "new normal" so as to reap whatever benefits there are and position themselves for the new industries. (The article I posted really goes into these parts.)
All this, once imposed, cannot be easily reversed. The whole system would suffer an unprecedented loss of face and credibility. So we're getting continuous double-downs and constant introductions of new elements of the fear. The propaganda just gets shriller and people buy into it, when you thought that was impossible.
"Wear a mask. Wear two, it's an act of love."
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by stickdog99 » Sat Feb 20, 2021 7:31 pm
dada » 20 Feb 2021 23:09 wrote:Maybe I'm wrong in reading this as a lament that the left is not more organized. Like the left is in competition with Capitalism. I think that after the author makes it clear that this is a war, there's a failure to follow through here. The left cannot compete, the tactics and strategies have evolved, the left has not only lost but actually learned from the past century.
by dada » Sat Feb 20, 2021 8:30 pm
by dada » Sat Feb 20, 2021 8:54 pm
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