Covid19: criminalising & pathologising dissent
Catte Black
Let’s start with a little thought experiment.
It’s the 14th century. The Black Death is surging through Europe. One third of the total population is dead or dying.
One in three people. Dead or dying.
Everyone knows someone who is sick. Everyone has lost someone. Whole families have been wiped out. There are not enough living and healthy to get in the harvest, which rots in the fields.
One morning, as you leave your cottage to get some water from the well for you and your one surviving child you see a stranger in the middle of the village green, robed in tawdry rags and speaking to anyone who will listen.
“This plague is a lie”, he says, “it’s nothing but the normal winter fever, and you have nothing to fear”.
“Don’t be a fool”, you reply. “The winter fever doesn’t carry off a third of my village and all but one of my children. The winter fever doesn’t cause strange swellings and festerings and a cough that no one can live through”.
And you walk on to the well, get your water and go home, ignoring him.
And everyone else in the village ignores him too. As does the Lord of the Manor.
Because this man is obviously crazed. Let him babble his nonsense for as long as he pleases, it can’t change the experiential reality of your lives. You know the Black Death is real and new and something to be uniquely feared. You have seen it with your own eyes.
Now suppose it’s some other time or place or dimension. And the Lord of the Manor conceives some poorly formed idea that the people he rules are out of control, too numerous, too lax – it doesn’t matter what his reasoning is. He wants them under tighter control, he wants them more reliant on him for food and hope. He sees profit for himself, or increased power. Or he truly believes he is saving the people from themselves.
So he announces that this year’s winter fever is something new and deadly that will kill a third of the population if people don’t do as he says.
Maybe he’s lying. Maybe he believes it. Maybe that part doesn’t matter.
Stay home, he says, let the harvest rot in the fields. If you go out you will die. I will send you food from my granary. I will save you.
So people stay home and let the harvest rot and get their allowance of food from the Lord’s granary, which turns out not to be quite enough actually.
One day you go out to get water for your seven healthy, but quite hungry, children, and you see a stranger on the village green.
“This plague is a lie”, he says, “it’s nothing but the normal winter fever, and you have nothing to fear”.
You pause, and listen. And you think…wait a minute, I haven’t seen anyone die of this plague, except old Master Wyvern, who was eight and eighty, and sick with consumption…
Now what do you do?
More importantly, what does the Lord of the Manor do?
I suggest the Lord of the Manor will send his men to remove the stranger ASAP. And if you say a word about the doubt seeded in your mind, you will soon be removed too.
A tawdry stranger claiming the plague is a lie can be safely ignored while the plague is obviously real. But once the plague is or even might be a lie that stranger becomes a threat, and he has to be silenced before too many people hear him.
With that in mind, let’s think about the rash of government action to silence or criminalise those spreading ‘misinformation’ about SARS-COV2 and its effect.
What exactly are they trying to silence, and why?
Here’s what the UK government says about that, in their bulletin reassuringly titled Government cracks down on spread of false coronavirus information online
The Rapid Response Unit, operating from within the Cabinet Office and No10, is tackling a range of harmful narratives online – from purported ‘experts’ issuing dangerous misinformation to criminal fraudsters running phishing scams.
Well, that’s quite a broad spectrum isn’t it. We could probably do with some more detail. What, for example, do they mean by “purported experts”?
Sadly, the bulletin doesn’t go into much detail, or offer any examples to clarify who or what they mean. Here it is in full so you can judge for yourselves:
Specialist units across government are working at pace to combat false and misleading narratives about coronavirus, ensuring the public has the right information to protect themselves and save lives.
The Rapid Response Unit, operating from within the Cabinet Office and No10, is tackling a range of harmful narratives online – from purported ‘experts’ issuing dangerous misinformation to criminal fraudsters running phishing scams.
Up to 70 incidents a week, often false narratives containing multiple misleading claims, are being identified and resolved. The successful ‘Don’t Feed the Beast’ public information campaign will also relaunch next week, to empower people to question what they read online.
Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said:
“We need people to follow expert medical advice and stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives. It is vital that this message hits home and that misinformation and disinformation which undermines it is knocked down quickly.
“We’re working with social media companies, and I’ll be pressing them this week for further action to stem the spread of falsehoods and rumours which could cost lives.
When false narratives are identified, the government’s Rapid Response Unit coordinates with departments across Whitehall to deploy the appropriate response. This can include a direct rebuttal on social media, working with platforms to remove harmful content and ensuring public health campaigns are promoted through reliable sources.
The unit is one of the teams feeding into the wider Counter Disinformation Cell led by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, made up of experts from across government and in the tech sector.
The Cell is engaging with social media platforms and with disinformation specialists from civil society and academia, to establish a comprehensive overview of the extent, scope and impact of disinformation related to coronavirus.
The Culture Secretary will be contacting social media companies this week to thank them for their good efforts to date, assess the progress made and discuss what other potential measures can be put in place to ensure accurate, honest information consistently reaches users of their platforms.
Penny Mordaunt, Paymaster General said:
“Holding your breath for ten seconds is not a test for coronavirus and gargling water for 15 seconds is not a cure – this is the kind of false advice we have seen coming from sources claiming to be medical experts.
“That is why government communicators are working in tandem with health bodies to promote official medical advice, rebut false narratives and clamp down on criminals seeking to exploit public concern during this pandemic.
“But the public can also help with this effort, so today we implore them to take some simple steps before sharing information online, such as always reading beyond the headline and scrutinising the source.
The public can help stop the spread of potentially dangerous or false stories circulating online by following official government guidance – the ‘SHARE’ checklist (see further information). This includes basic but essential advice such as checking the source of a story and analysing the facts before sharing.
Certain states routinely use disinformation as a policy tool, so the government is also stepping up its efforts to share its assessments on coronavirus disinformation with international partners. Working collaboratively has already helped make the UK safer, providing ourselves and our allies with a better understanding of how different techniques are used as part of malicious information operations – and how to protect against those techniques more effectively.
These measures follow recent advice from the National Cyber Security Centre, which revealed a range of attacks being perpetrated online by cyber criminals seeking to exploit coronavirus earlier this month.
This included guidance on how to spot and deal with suspicious emails related to coronavirus, as well as mitigate and defend against malware and ransomware.
A similarly vague and non-specific claim of ‘malicious’ misinformation and opportunistic scammers is referred to in the article linked in this tweet:
Heads up, what’s coming down the pipe in Canada: https://t.co/6on6O2zD8J@DanDicksPFT @OffGuardian0 @o_rips @delbigtree @HighWireTalk
— Prös Güd (@GudPros) April 15, 2020
Apparently, in all this mass of Newspeak, the only actual piece of ‘misinformation’ anyone can find to refute is some alleged claim that ‘holding your breath for 10 seconds’ is a test for the coronavirus, and gargling water for fifteen minutes is a cure. Do they really need a whole unit to contain a few bits of nonsense like that?
What are they even trying to combat? Their own data and public statements which say covid19 is mild to harmless for most people? Real (not “purported”) experts such as Ioannidis who have offered rational analyses of that data?
No one denies SARS-COV2 is symptomless or produces a mild cold-like illness in 80% of infected people (some estimates put that number as high as 99%).
No-one denies it. Quite the contrary. They all say it. If you know where to look.
The WHO says it. The BBC says it. Most government websites say it, over and over and over again.
They have to admit this, even while they simultaneously promote panic memes in defiance of these facts. Because it is overwhelmingly and obviously true.
So, they say it, quietly, while simultaneously shrieking “be afraid!” in hopes the screaming will blind us all to the facts.
This is the fundamental weakness that needs to be protected by deterring people from questioning the fear.
So far this strategy has worked well, to the extent most people seem convinced the “science” supports the panic memes, and anyone taking up our position on this issue is described as ‘doubting the science’.
Let’s dispel this.
We are questioning the rationale for the panic. And we are doing that with science and expert opinion.
We remind our readers repeatedly that the data is what supports or refutes the panic memes, not our opinions, or those of any other non-qualified commentators.
The anti-science is coming from those uncritically promoting irrational and poorly sourced fear of this coronavirus.
Major real world physical threats don’t need PR departments and censorship to convince people of their danger. They don’t need falsely inflated fatality stats achieved by flagrant manipulation of the data.
The Lord of the Manor only feels the need to lock up the stranger on the village green if the plague is more lie than truth.
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The sound of bat striking ball as another great article makes it out of the park.
As someone not at all inclined to accept germ theory as a whole truth but only as a part truth taken out of context and re-contextualised to serve narratives of state and commerce, I see the susceptibility to believe it as an extension of ancient fear of divine wrath, and virology as a rational construct over demonology.
But the underlying biological reality is an episode of sickness within conditions of resilience, or not, of trust and solid nursing, or not, and of deeper understanding, alignment and acceptance of life, or not.
The Black Death was much more virulent in the Americas with up to 95% of people dying. This occurred to a very great extent BEFORE the European settlements, who found death had gone before them.
My source for this was the research published in ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me – Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong’ by Professor James Loewen. He doesn’t question the cause or source of the plague – but it clearly pre-empted and pre emptied a lot of farmed and cleared land for easy occupation.
The ‘Indian native who guided the settlers from the Mayflower in establishing their settlement was a twice escaped slave who had escaped England, failed to get home via Nova Scotia, been captured again but then escaped from Spain. On finally returning to his homeland everyone of his tribe was dead.
Fred Hoyle, a former Astronomer Royal, had come to believe that microbes came from space – which as he put it was a trip from London to Dover – upwards. Since his time there is a lot more recognition of a constant interchange of energetic particles. When Christian Birkeland first claimed the Aurora were caused by particles from the Sun he was ignored or ridiculed by the closed mind/closed system models of the day – until the first space explorations simply proved him correct.
While it may be possible that there are forms of life that exist in some microbial form that can travel through such conditions, I am much more of the opinion that ionised particulates of organic and inorganic molecules are the ‘dust’ of such filaments currents and tails that are increasing visible to our various extensions of sensing magnetic plasmas. The potential events I lead up to being the tail of comets or of Venus – whose plasma tail now reaches just short of the Earth and Moon – who really share an orbital fulcrum by the way.
Great Fear and dread of comets characterises our history and is part of our collective experience of the prehistoric ‘mythological era’ that is opaque to our rationalising surface consciousness and yet formed the very archetypes of our narrative mind. Not least as separation trauma and no less buried or denied as a species than can be observed in individual experience of psychotic dissociation.
While there are various factors in the current outbreak of ‘plague’ that may be changing as it unfolds, the initial outbreaks were areas of known and recorded extremely polluted air. I have yet to see expert toxicologists brought in to offer their perspective – but with the initial AIDS cases, they had feasible explanation and remedy that was simply swept away by the ‘gold rush’ of the discovery of a new virus, and thus of a whole new range of drugs. The vaccine never came because the presence of ‘HIV” antibodies – (as supposedly revealed by just such tests as are currently revealed as able to give false positives from a number of other vectors) – is taken as INFECTION – NOT immunity.
Note: Gallo was found fraudulent in his initial claims. Montagnier extracted the viral soup that was then claimed to be the CAUSE of AIDS though it was never isolated. At a later date the search for such an inscrutably dark retrovirus, was abandoned for the HIV cloned virus that was effectively spliced from code fragments. NOTE this ability to ‘generate’ the genetic definition from a composite. NOTE also that the identified and usually short code strings needed to provide a ‘match’ are within varying percentages (I have read both 60% and 80% from different sources. But I have read that the percentage difference in DNA of human and chimpanzee is 1%. Are we consulting the goats entrails?
So if poisons can pervade our atmosphere from comets as well as volcanic activity, and now from industrial and agribusiness pollutions, where is the contagion? Hoyle and a mathematician whose name I don’t recall, did exhaustive research on data relating to transmission of flu – and found meteorological conditions were the primary vector. But does this mean the virus is airborne – or does it mean that toxicity triggers immune response. Organic toxins are cleared by bacterial or fungal agents – when the immune function is supported and functional. But inorganic toxins would kill the macrophages etc – and so the cells produce solvents the break down and get rid of the toxin – through the body to such outlets as mucus, pustules, and sweat, as well as via the normal eliminations of the body but more extreme – such as vomiting and diarrhoea.
I have read that another vector for the triggering of virus is fear. I haven’t found if this is a nocebo effect or a cortisol imbalance. But a life ending diagnosis can kill, even if if the test it was based on turned out to be in error.
Apocalyptic fear is not just a Judaeo Christian legacy. The Aztecs so feared the coming of the end or the ‘Sun’ or Era, that they had elaborate sacrificial ritual as not just their attempt to forfend the End of the World Age – but based their identity on doing so and made way upon all other tribes as a supply of sacrifice. Even during their war with the conquistadors, they maintained such practices and the resources to enact them. It was their sacred duty to save the world by war and sacrifice. This pattern is repugnant to our current moral sensibilities – but the forms it took then were out in the open, while the pattern remains hidden and unhealed.
Terror from above and below is not our current sense of a uniform and gradual stable world that we project back millions of years as essentially the same and forwards to its falling into the Sun by clockwork calculations of closed system thinking. But I pose that such terror – and also awe – has been – and has structured human consciousness in its ‘imagery’ or symbolic representation as meaning wrested or inherited from chaos.
So the Black Death may have been both pollution and great dread – along with fervour. Crops were left unharvested and yet the End did don’t come – but starvation and disease together with every kind of madness did. The physic and the psychic become fused by association. For we have a mental equivalent to antibodies in terms of triggered past reactions that can also display physical symptoms. Perhaps even periodic bouts or surfacing of unhealed trauma that has no name, so much as patterns of re-enactment that flow down the generations.
The separation of psychic and physic or mind and matter is a direct result of recoil from Infinity at the Heart – as a split off sense of mind in self-isolating lockdown against the Messengers of Wholeness of being – who are NOT in lockstep under ‘He who must not be named’ – and speak in ways that question the defences set against The Great Enemy as generating the very thing they are set against.
Life under closed system, is war, depletion, sickness and death – however managed or contested by shifting narratives. Now we arrive at a time where narratives no longer serve to extend and share Meaning – however imperfectly, but have become leverage of mind controlled mindlessness of conditioned responses under those who would be as gods – and those who align by sacrifice of life under power set over it.
However, the very nature of those who would ‘control’ exhibits exactly the errors they fear and accuse and seek to eradicate in the OTHER – and indeed in the people – especially upon the curve of a rising consciousness to the nature of their true condition.
The Opening of the mind, can be the reopening of deep fears.
And we need no experts to tell us that fear can run contagion regardless any basis in fact.
The fear of others can be felt as imprisoning, demanding and hateful – and trigger a like response in a moment to make social distance psychic as well as physic.
Compassion is the quality of recognising others in ourself and ourself in others.
But sympathy can judge ourselves in others and – in a moment – use them to raise a sense of self-vindication seeking reinforcement.
In this difference is all the difference between descent into hell or unfolding new potentials.
The underlying Messenger is Change.
But compassion has to start with the embrace of our own psychic-emotional patterns – and their physical expression.
“Don’t feed the Beast” holds a truth that is misrepresented by the projection of fears that are attacked in the Other or the world. It can be said in innumerable ways – but to be understood, it must be recognised, that the ‘beast’ is fed by emotional reaction operating without consciousness in the Heart and short-circuiting the Heart so as to run a usurping narrative exclusion zone.
If you only ‘woke’ to nightmare – you dream still.
If ‘woke’ is to dream set against nightmare, then lockstep in a dream bubble set and guarded within Fear that may be temporarily mitigated by giving love to isolation and exclusion – so as to all feed the means to technologically – and bio-technologically provide it.
To cross this bridge – break step – but to the attunement of your heart’s desire. This is not reactive nor apologetic for existing. Nor do we seek to deny the right in another that we hold true and worthy in ourself. Liberty is set against tyranny. But freedom to be ourselves is already given but for the willingness to share it.
What am I already doing or believing and enacting that limits my freedom to align this moment with the truth of who I am? No call to feed the blame – but willingness to re-evaluate for the potential of a release of suffering and limitation regardless current circumstances.
Too long, didn’t read.
When you look back at the great plagues in Europe and the virgin soil epidemics that raged through the Americas you also find two additional factors and those are oppression and genocide. These are also known as stressors.
There were other factors like hygiene. To say that Medieval cultures were unhygienic would be an understatement. Nobody took a bath because it was considered a pagan ritual whereas the American Indians were fastidious to a fault who bathed all the time in the rivers and streams that became polluted by mining, the European form of agriculture and by raw sewage.
Anyway things have changed since then with water purification ,general improvements in hygiene and sensible quarantine protocols have been the main factors that have contributed to less visits by the fourth horseman not vaccines.
Thus the chances of such plagues devastating the population are quite slim. Almost null. Leaving only one conclusion and that this whole coronavirus scam is one big psyop.
My feeling about Covid-19 is that if it does kill millions in the end, it will mainly do so in South Asia or African countries, and even then it might not be the disease itself but the social knock-on effects. I have read of shops being looted by hungry people in South Africa, for example.
Despite media alarmism, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, AIDS has been a somewhat niche and limited illness in Europe, North America and Australasia, while being a major killer in Africa. Covid-19 will probably turn out to be similar.
Africa? May be not. Because of the prevalence of malaria there, choloroquine is readily available there.
Good dichotomy in the ArTicLe parablizing
. Very little chance of a tracheotomy sneaking in there. I’m sorry, I’ll read that again: “Very little chance of a trichotomy sneaking in here.”
Talking of dichotomies, why all the discussion about life v death? Is that all viruses do? Let you be or kill you? Why aren’t they called dichotoruses?
Watch before it’s taken down
https://youtu.be/F8pVwl-9THU
Any doctor can have an opinion, but it doesn’t mean to say it’s right.
Shoot! too late.
Okay, so in the first example, the wise people don’t listen to the madman because his claim doesn’t reflect what they have experienced with their own eyes. They have seen 1 in 3 people fall dead. Therefore the madman is clearly lying.
In the second, they make the mistake of believing something they haven’t had direct experience of. The madman says, look, it is not happening but he is not believed.
Logic: only believe what you have experienced at first hand. If you haven’t experienced it, there is a good chance that what you are being told is a lie.
Can I ask how this story works in regards to climate change catastrophe or nuclear weapons or even the deep state, something most of us haven’t experienced directly?
“Logic: only believe what you have experienced at first hand. If you haven’t experienced it, there is a good chance that what you are being told is a lie.”
Indeed, the new priest classes or and medicine men, the experts, they are a re-emergence of the men who ruled historically by means of projected magical powers. They use a mix these days, they have assumed the task of prophecy (by means of their computer models), warning about apocalypse like situations.
The ‘science’ they use is mostly too complex and requires too much effort and competences for most men to check upon and look at critically, so they show their magical infographics and statistics, and they spice it up with doomsday prophecies (appeal to emotion, stirring collective emotions which are extremely powerful).
Applies both to the coronavirus and human cause climate change scams.
Great observation. I have come quite close to the idea of computer models and their high priests having what amounts to magical powers of prediction that no one can challenge but never actually got there.
In climate and coronavirus they are always wrong but that’s irrelevant They can also lie with impunity because there is no one in the media who will stand up to them.
In the real Black Death it is unlikely anyone said it was not happening. The death toll was just too obviously high. The reaction was despair, religious mania and sometimes pogroms against Jews.
My suspicion is that in the Middle Ages something like Covid-19 would have been considered too mild to even be noticed. If the local lord had engaged in the kind of manipulation this article writes about, the villeins would have gone along with it superficially to humour him but not taken it very seriously.
Medieval peasants were not always submissive – sometimes local rebellions broke out, usually savagely repressed, sometimes heresies gained a following. Lollardy for example spread in England a few decades after the Black Death.
Absolutely! No question. The old adage holds true. Don’t feed…
I’ve only recently come across offGuardian, and only because of what’s happening currently with the pandemic panic. I’ve been finding it progressively difficult to establish any kind of rational conversation surrounding the government measures [UK] with certain friends, often being met with flat, uncompromising replies such as ‘What is there to make of it. It’s about saving lives, end of.’ or outright zealotry in support for the lock-down measures. A psychological need to believe that these measures are absolutely the right thing to be doing and supporting is becoming an apparent knock-on effect of the imposed circumstances. Not that this isn’t a well observed social phenomenon, but I’m genuinely surprised by the sheer unquestioning blindness of people right now. On the one hand, being by nature a skeptical and questioning person, I am told that nobody has the definitive answer and that questioning is essentially pointless, whilst on the other hand simultaneously provided with the apparent definitive answer and that I’m being contrarian for raising questions over the multiple contradictory weird aspects to it all. One other common thing is the sudden belief that this disease possesses special abilities that no other disease in history has been capable of. Seems at least here people are able to discuss these things openly and rationally.
A psychological need to believe that these measures are absolutely the right thing to be doing and supporting is becoming an apparent knock-on effect of the imposed circumstances.
— compare that with the similar compulsive need, of the same sort of people, to believe in the official 9/11 faery tale, against all available evidence.
It’s a serious mental disorder, probably related to these people’s suppressed awareness of their own fundamental hypocrisy, cowardice, and stupidity, which the public collapse of official narratives would make clear even to themselves.
Not that this isn’t a well observed social phenomenon, but I’m genuinely surprised by the sheer unquestioning blindness of people right now.
— it’s only when the tide goes out, that you can clearly see what absolute f***ing idiots so many people actually are.
Consider it an opportunity to evaluate whether certain friends are actually worth having. As for myself, I have no desire to be around people whose now-revealed consciousness fills me with revulsion.
Bravo.
I’ve not heard any claim that this disease is like no other in history. It’s said to be a new Coronavirus but not unlike SARS (2003). Lockdown protests are increasingly popular in the US but please check out your bedfellows in that argument, the Far Right. Similarly it is noticeable the only major Statesman suggesting fraud on a massive scale is President Bolsanaro of Brazil!
Oh, it is so good to be able to come to a site and hear voices from far and wide who feel the same. I am finding it almost impossible to converse with anyone because invariably the topic is the virus and how terrible it all is, i want to run through the supermarket with a loudhailer screaming “hoax! wake up it’s all a hoax!” but i’d be jumped and arrested.Please keep up the great work as i would be distraught without the off. xx
My problem with John Ioannidis is that he contradicts himself. He has also said (in a Journeyman Pictures video) that covid 19 is “a major threat.”
I really believe that is him trying to be ‘balanced’. I think many of these experts, like Ioannidis, or David Katz, would love to come out and just scream ‘it’s all bullshit, it’s literally the flu, let’s go back to normal’ but they know that if they do that, there message won’t ever see the light of day. By ameliorating your argument a bit, so playing to the (brainwashed) crowd, ‘Yes, it is a major threat, but…..’ it might get more people to listen to you, than just telling them outright ‘What you think is a major threat is no worse than a bad cold’, which immediately gets people into a defensive stance and some will just instantly turn away, regardless if you can prove your argument. I’ve experienced this with friends during this pandemic in the same way, if I soften my position from what I really think, I’ve got at least some chance they might listen, if I just outright tell them the facts, they will immediately shutdown.
You’re probably right. But I can’t do that. I can’t manipulate that way. Some might say that there’s a difference between manipulating that way in order to help people and manipulating, or lying slightly, in order to accomplish an evil purpose. I understand that argument. People can judge me for my position if they want, but I don’t lie, not even in order to survive. (I’m not saying that I’m superman. This is precisely the sort of situation where I could see myself failing. So far, I haven’t.) I just had it out with my boss who explained that G4S has to show the city (Toronto) that it’s in compliance government guidelines blah, blah and therefore G4S needs guards to sign a form that shows that they are and therefore the company is. What’s maddening is that the form was so general, I could almost sign it and keep my job. But there was one small paragraph that I couldn’t get around: “At all times, it is your personal responsibility to inform yourself and to comply with applicable law, regulation, orders and directives concerning the COVID-19 situation (and as this situation evolves).” Besides sort of asking me to agree or disagree to items unseen, there’s nothing specific in that. But it is clear what is being referred to, namely the nonsense rules surround covid 19.
I emailed my boss (and he’s both my immediate supervisor and in charge of Toronto) and told him that I couldn’t sign the form and am prepared to accept the consequences. He called me about an hour ago (and instead of sleeping I’m awake and ill) and we had it out. He was having a lot of difficulty. He explain robotically what his position was and I’d say that I understand but I can’t sign the form. Instead of telling me very directly that he was removing me from my site, he said that ‘if’ I didn’t sign it, he’d have to remove from my site and then where would I go? Was he saying that G4S would have to fire me or not?, because we can be moved to different sites. I should have asked him, but I was having difficulty too, with my voice going funny and my body literally shaking. The bugger left me hanging. I’d rather he pulled the trigger, but he left me hanging. According to him, I will be losing my site (job?), but after repeating himself a few times, he just abruptly said good-bye. Before he said good-bye, I told him what I thought of the virus and the rules that he said we had to follow. I told him I won’t be washing my hands every 20 minutes etc and that if I told him that I would be following them, then I’d by lying. That made him uncomfortable. I suspect that he didn’t want me to ask him whether he was washing his hands every 20 minutes, social distancing and never touching his face. He would have lied, but perhaps he didn’t want to lie to me because he knew I’d know he was lying.
Is it like Linoge in Storm of the Century said when, after terrorizing the islanders off the coast of Maine (I believe it was) into giving him a child who he could raise as an apprentice evil wizard, and confronting the citizens who succumbed and who reasoned that they had no choice, he said that ‘Perhaps you tricked yourselves’ or something like that.
I won’t do ‘whatever’ it takes in order to survive – if it involves violating my integrity. The war-making State didn’t give me life and can’t really take it away. It can kill me, or even cause me to be killed, but only the Source of life can give and take life.
Exactly my experience, even with close friends & relatives who know me as a career research scientist. My main differentiating skill was or is the ability to see patterns in sparse data & to form hypotheses, make predictions & to be right slightly more often & faster than my peers. I acknowledge that this ability places me at risk occasionally of seeing patterns which aren’t there & occasionally to fall in love with my hypothesis.
With this in mind, I became convinced around 3 weeks ago that our response to Covid19 has been inappropriately intense. I don’t blame politicians for lockdown but I do blame them for painting us into a corner which it will be very hard to get out of.
Interested to know if I would be ‘pathologised’ for saying that fawning Joe-Biden-sycophant Andrew Yang is a prize 21st century racist. He considers non-techies utterly expendable but miraculously never asks whether the Silicon Valley geeks are constantly stealing the knowledge of those non-techies to write code.
I think someone should ask the unreconstructed slave-to-billionaires Andrew Yang the following:
1. What value does snooping by tech algorithms add/how is it not simple stealing?
Why is he not prepared to demand every organisation sign a weekly document stating that no surveillance for commercial purposes has occurred, upon pain of entire boards losing 100% of assets?
Then he might value ‘non-techies’ as he would believe in honesty and integrity, not wild west theft and larceny as is his current deepest principle.
2. Will he call Adam d’Angelo, CEO of Quora, an unprincipled, genocidal CIA whore??
If not, why not?? Is he a fervent believer in Americans murdering the world over but still being the most humane people on earth?
He would not be allowed into any church I ran if he held such repulsive views….
3. Does he think Jeff Bezos would be anywhere without ridiculously overpriced Govt defence contracts?
If he approves of Bezos making employees piss in bottles, then he is unfit to be a father and his children need to be taken away by social services. It would be entirely appropriate for all those put-down employees to piss all over HIM…..
He wants to lionize Bezos, there are consequences, techy boy.
4. Who does he think he is calling himself a patriot when his loyalty is to robots at the expense of humans?
Why should those expendable humans have any loyalty to his human rights, up to and including him retaining his eyesight, his genitals and his ability to walk?
5. Yang needs to get real and say the following: ‘I am a techie whore who will let anything in the murky online wild west go because the CIA told me to, Bezos- and Zuckerberg told me to and Gates told me to’.
Then at least he would be being honest….
By the way, lawyers never add value in business, they just add chicaneries.
Silicon Valley geeks
who’s the bigot now???
In order for a population to bray in unison, the propagandizing must have taken place well in advance. This lockstep thinking is not being enforced by pathologising dissent, rather it is embraced by the population who are acting as the government’s willing beadles.
It is too late to change many minds. We can only acknowledge that political correctness is indeed a totalitarian tool and that we should not have excused it as a ‘leftish foible’. We should have paid attention to the totalitarian undercurrents in education. Cultural Marxism is not an alt-right conspiracy theory. The universities’ war on critical thinking, the ridiculous privileging of this and cancelling of that has produced western populations of… well, look for yourself.
Only economic conditions can change the popular mind now (Marx got that bit right) and we can try to amplify and push the course of events.
The media’s take on PC and Covid is that governments were too ‘woke’ and somehow failed to act quickly, for example by imposing travel bans. If anyone did suggest that was racist I doubt many people took them seriously. Political Correctness does play a role in Covid but it is rather different: by suppressing the right to hold opinions and by subordinating knowledge to political pragmatism, PC helps silence expert voices and ‘cancels’ the individual in the face of the tribe.
PC is not at all woke, actually. It is tribal and authoritarian but it cloaks this by pretending to stand for the voice of the underprivileged. The victim’s role is to be a temporary distraction from anyone the tribe wants to silence. For tactic to work, all individual voices must fall quiet while the spotlight determines who has the privilege to speak. Since the right to speak is relative, opinion must be suspect.
It is that silencing of individual voices that governments find especially attractive in political correctness because PC already ‘pathologizes dissent’.
The least looked at aspect of ‘political correctness’ is its Soviet origins. Virtually no-where in the press or even from a lot of alternative online commentators will you hear it discussed in direct relation to Lenin and the Party Line.
I’m still not clear who is organising this world wide conspiracy to persuade us the virus is just normal flu – and more importantly why they would do that. What’s their end game? They see an advantage in impoverishing the world and collapsing Capitalism? I am also curious as to why advocates of ‘its a huge hoax’ don’t laud the sayings of those who support the ‘hoax’ line. Men like Bolsanaro and the President of Belarus hardly get a mention here but aren’t they the foremost proponents of the ‘its a hoax, it doesn’t exist’ line. Personally I prefer Lula’s speech reported this morning. I suppose the old Leftie is backing the hoax for – what reason?
It’s puzzling how you have managed to remain unaware of the massive rollout of surveillance and biometric monitoring measures, the mass vaccine program, the plans to literally outlaw and criminalise dissent and to permanently restrict movement to those who are deemed ‘safe’ thru vaccine or acquired immunity.
Are you suggesting they are not really happening because you can’t think of a good reason why they should?
We have never claimed covid19 is a hoax. A hoax is not necessary. Exaggeration of a given threat and panic memes are enough to make people frightened and vulnerable.
I’m very well aware of new surveillance and phone control. It was a major feature of our lives before the virus. Govts will seize the opportunity to tighten those measures but the only way to deal with that is to get political control rather than run away and hide. This could be an opportunity for the left but sadly that is never discussed.
An opportunity for ‘the left’ in what way?
To let the big international Corporations lose profit and collapse and for a strong State to take over their industries by way of sweeping Nationalisation. An unashamedly socialist idea that quite a few won’t like but think on about how the Corps will screw their workers and consumers to regain that lost profit. It’s odd it’s never mentioned and people seem more interested in saving those institutions as if there never was a need for Change and radical Reform just a few months ago.
The ‘nationalisation’ project is part of the plan being openly promoted By the people at the heart of this narrative. Nationalisation being, in this case, not govt takeover of corporations, but final and overt corporate takeover of govt, with we the people openly funding their monopolies, while they sell us shoddy goods and services at any price they choose, or indeed withhold them from us for not being vaccinated or having enough good citizen points.
Citation please that Nationalisation is being promoted by the pushers of the ‘narrative’ you oppose? You chose to define Nationalisation as the very opposite of what is normally understood! That’s very convenient. Can you cite anybody who calls globalisation and Corporate take over as ‘Nationalisation’? The clue is in the word – take over by ‘nations’ not bosses!
The very point being made is how the word can be reinterpreted. Renationalisation is certainly going on.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/covid-19-government-suspends-rail-franchise-agreements
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-airline-railways-bus-nationalised-uk-grant-shapps-covid-19-a9407276.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-spain-nationalises-private-hospitals-emergency-covid-19-lockdown-2020-3?r=US&IR=T
https://www.euractiv.com/section/coronavirus/news/after-declaring-war-on-covid-19-france-readies-measures-to-uphold-economy/
Are you going to keep up this recalcitrant schoolboy routine much longer?
This is my last attempt to explain. No one has asked for citation for generalised discussion, just specifically when it comes to unsourced claims about the purported deadliness or exoticness of this VIRUS, as it steers debate and ties in with the bottomless pit of hysteria in the mainstream. I shall continue to do my best to interpret this in good faith, however, as any grownup person with any level of responsibility will surely know (who isn’t in the process of acting out) there is always a judgement call and this can always be discussed courteously if you disagree. None of your comments have been censored as you claim, and nor have you been threatened with a ban, as you claim. You are free to post opinions, but your posts my be flagged if you don’t observe the above recommendation.
Can we get on with having a discussion BTL? If you disregard this message and carry on in this vein I will remove these messages as trolling. Thank you. Admin2
Weyland-Yutani cometh
a strong State
yes, that’s what we mainly need, a strong state.
like the ones that Hitler and Stalin had, for example.
A strong State in the hands of principled politicians is better than relying yet again on laissez faire neo liberal money market wins GoVt we’ve suffered for decades. Nationalisation frightens the elites for very obvious reasons, it restricts their profit.
I think I can spot your mistake here …
Every mobile phone user’s location is tracked regardless of Covid-19, it was happening Pre-Covid-19 and will happen post Covid-19. Being able to identify a user’s location, or more precisely, the location of the phone, is part of the fundamental way the mobile phone networks work.
If you think the security services don’t have access to that geo-location data and did not have access to it pre-Covid, them you are naive.
There is no mass vaccine roll out programme for Covid-19. There cannot be as there is no vaccine.
“We are questioning the rationale for the panic”
not even a little frisson of dunkirk/blitz spirit….her majesty comforting the sick body of the nation…Fergie strangling a soft toy ..Harry getting a weave….
Consume. Be Silent. Obey. To which we must add Denounce Deniers.
Where is your citation that anybody is saying ‘Denounce Deniers’? Links please! Most people have no idea there are Deniers.
kangal is referring to the themes raised in the article, which has links on it.
Admin thank you. I have noticed on another site people freaking out “oh god not offg..they,ve gone full Icke” even mild scepticism, mine is not really mild and I suspect it will become acute by and by, is met with shrieks of outrage….the fate of humanity demands you …they have a list of requirements …oh anyway the Muslims have joke.
One day a doctrinaire scholar went to visit a famous Sufi who he observed from a distance that the purported wali was drinking and singing in the company of pretty girls. He was outraged and upraided the oblivious revellers and stalked off, replete not with mere citations but the evidence of his own eyes of the corruption Pirs.
So that night Jibril appeared to him in a dream and asked him “what of all creation would most like to see”
“I wish to see the hells” he found himself saying and so off they went
Firstly they came to fire like the mouth of a well perhaps a little larger around its edge stood two demons who were ferociously driving back the souls trying to escape the fire.
“That” Jibril told him “Is the hell of the Jews”
Next they came to lake of fire around which were stationed three huge demons and as before they forced back into the flames the denizens confined therein.
“That is the hell of the Christians”
Finally they came to a veritable sea of fire around which there stationed no demons the surface was smooth as glass, no struggling no noise.
“That” Jibril announced “Is the hell of the Muslims”
The scholar smiled contentedly “I see it must be empty, I see no guards or escapees”
“Oh no” Jibril corrected him “If anything its more rammed than the others, it’s just that the Muslims keep each other in the flames”
awesome post
Cower-in-Place aka lock-down was never about saving lives. It was expressly to reduce pressure on hospital services – and the result is that hospitals are mostly empty. That is according to the official proclamations.
But why close all the businesses – that is an economic heist. We have been given no explanation as to why it is essential to close down the economy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6-zctThYsY
Chase that profit? Get back to work you swine before the great corporations that feed and clothe us suffer profit loss, pack their bags and go. Or alternatively take over those businesses for the sake of the workers and customers rather than the CEO’s and shareholders. Without profit millions of the rentier class will be forced to go to work. And why not you may say?
Or indeed, why we can’t open everything up now it is clear that the NHS can cope with plenty to spare.
I am surprised at your statement “We have been given no explanation as to why it is essential to close down the economy. “.
Such a statement implies that closing down the economy is an objective of the lock-down policy, when clearly no such objective exists.
The shutting down of the economy is a side effect – ie. not a primary objective – of the lock-down policy. And the lock-down policy is in effect to reduce how quickly the virus spreads.
Slowing the spread of the virus doesn’t save lives, when all is said and done. A certain percentage of people will die, based on the case fatality rate, (usually expressed as a percentage); slowing the rate of infection will still result in the same number of deaths but just over a longer period of time.
The singular purpose therefore of slowing the spread is to prevent hospitals becoming overwhelmed, which would result in an increase in deaths because the hospitals cannot provide adequate treatment to all those that need it.
There is a balance to be struck between protecting people’s lives and the impact on the economy.
At the start of this pandemic, it is evident the UK government decided to focus its priority on the economy and failed to take any meaningful action to stem the spread of the virus. As time as gone by, they clearly have had a rethink and are now focussing their attention on protecting lives.
“We need people to follow expert medical advice and stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives.” Is a blatant piece of misinformation and obvious propaganda. The Stay at Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives” exhortation is not expert medical advice, it is a policy: and policy, all policy, is always a value judgement. And we should all recall that this policy was decided upon by the government without any consideration of the number of people it would kill, as Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, admitted at the Coronavirus Daily Update press briefing on 10 April 2020. https://viewsandstories.blogspot.com/2020/04/coronavirus-policy-making.html
The policy changed. It changed from herd immunity to “do everything possible to prevent it spreading”.
Dave, when was population immunity the government’s policy?
Lol at OffG drinking the Kool-Aid on the Black “Death”. There was never any Black (sic) Death! It was all a ploy by the Rothschilds to switch the then feudal economy to a fuller monetary basis that could be exploited by usury. Although I have always agreed with 99.9995 per cent of everything said on this site, I am outraged to see you say just one thing that conflicts with the raging apiary in my highly constricted bonnet, so logically you must really be a ‘limited hangout’. Now where can I find the truth other than David Icke. I won’t comment here again! /s
So, you are going back to the Daily Mail then…
And who said satire was dead?
This being the Internet, I am obliged to point out to the general readership (for the second time) that it actually was satire. Quite a few seem not to have realized. Nice to see so many displeased to recognize themselves in action on kindred sites, however, and showing their ire via the downvote button. At least, I hope that is what happened. If there are 13 downvoters who think I am actually proposing that the Black Death really was a hoax, then satire is not so much dead as unviable due to a dearth of perspicacity in modern readers.
Satire died a long time ago – not because people were stupid but because the world, and certainly the media, rendered satire unrecognizable.
Three examples from history:
• Randy Newman wrote a song called “Political Science” in which he ironically takes on the role of a “Let’s just nuke ‘em all!” American bigot. Newman said that when he sang the song back in the 70s everyone ot the joke. But when he sang itin later decades, a lot of listeners thought, “Damn straight!”
• Tom Lehrer, the satirical songwriter, said he stopped the moment Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, after which it was clear that satire was dead.
• Karl Kraus, the Viennese satirist, stopped just when you would expect him to go into overdrive i.e. when the Nazis came. Perhaps he too, realised that these events were beyond satire because they were already a satire on themselves.
And these two show that Right Wingers know all about how to use smartarse satirists against themselves:
• Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” is actually a bitter attack on the US government – which didn’t at all stop Ronald Reagan from wanting to appropriate it as a Republican anthem.
• The film Forrest Gump was based on a book that was meant to be a satire on the American Dream. Those who made the film just took it at face value. Which is why the film is a piece of Right Wing gospel.
See also Poe’s Law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Conclusion: If you are going to say that opposite of what you mean it only serves you right if some take you (knowingly?) at face value.
And “a clear indication of the author’s intent” would have been the “/s ” at the end of the comment.
Said without prejudice to the rest of your comment.
I am unfamiliar with the significance of the “/s”. And I see it means
I wouldn’t have known that. So now I’ve learned something.
Incidentally, I cottoned on to your satirical intent from ” the raging apiary in my highly constricted bonnet”. Cute.
It would be nice to close this on a cordial note. Obviously I cannot in good faith congratulate you on your shrewdness in determining satirical intent from the most heavy-handed part of the comment. I am pleased that you learned something. You may find it useful in a world ruled by Poes’s Law.
Au revoir.
You seem to think you are so clever when people do not catch your intent. But you did not catch mine. When I told you I’d learned something, that was me just being polite. And for my pains you turn around and insult me from your assumed position of lofty intellectual superiority. Well I’ll now lay my card on the table.
Sarcasm is an impotent matter and there’s none more stupid than those who think they are smart. Let’s take your initial satiric masterpiece. Who are you mocking? Conspiracists or those who mock conspiracists? I have read plenty of this kind of sophomoric humour and I have wondered if the writer is writing from a position of A or not-A or not-not-A. And I realise that there is no point in continuing with them.
I shall leave you to masturbate in your eyrie.
It was all a ploy by the Rothschilds to switch the then feudal economy to a fuller monetary basis that could be exploited by usury.
there weren’t any Rothschilds in England in the fourteenth century, you dumbass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Expulsion
You walked right into that one, didn’t you. Now man up and do the gentlemanly thing, or be revealed as something more than a slovenly reader.
As Bunk from the The Wire (which I’m using the lockdown to enjoy again) may have observed: “that is some scary mother-fuckin shit right there”.
Thanks Catte – beautifully written article. I’m genuinely stunned at the speed of progress and utter brazenness of police-state monitoring of speech in the UK. I’m not dissing the UK, just observing the prevailing powers seems to genuinely feel absolutely no threat or need for subterfuge (unlike across the channel where the powers still need to pretend, though the populace is increasingly calling them out)
Keep up the great work.
No problem if you were dissing the UK. We get the rulers we deserve.
This is a must read article!
——
The Tyranny of (Alleged) Experts
Barry Brownstein
– April 16, 2020
Think again if you believe draconian controls recommended by a few (but far from all) medical experts are saving many lives from COVID-19. Facts reported by mathematician Yitzhak Ben Israel of Tel Aviv University don’t support such beliefs.
Professor Israel found that no matter how much or little politicians quarantined the population, “coronavirus peaked and subsided in the exact same way.” Whether the country relied on politicians shutting the country down (the US and UK, for example) or private voluntary actions (Sweden), Prof. Israel’s work shows that “all countries experienced seemingly identical coronavirus infection patterns, with the number of infected peaking in the sixth week and rapidly subsiding by the eighth week.”
In short, coercive measures imposed to protect the public from COVID-19 are as effective as throwing magical “tiger dust” in Central Park to keep tigers at bay in Manhattan.
Why are we so enamored with experts and their tiger dust? Simply, we don’t understand the inherent fallibility of human beings. Well-meaning experts can be as destructive as authoritarian politicians.
….
https://www.aier.org/article/the-tyranny-of-alleged-experts/
Thanks – great article.
throwing magical “tiger dust” in Central Park to keep tigers at bay in Manhattan
This story fits in to the narrative and wasn’t mentioned:
——
German Lawyer Who Criticized Lockdown Arrested, Taken to Psych Ward
Claims she was violently abused by authorities for calling for protest against quarantine.
15 April, 2020
A German medical lawyer who criticized the coronavirus lockdown law was arrested and taken to a psychiatric ward, where she says she was violently abused by authorities.
….
https://summit.news/2020/04/15/german-lawyer-who-criticized-lockdown-arrested-taken-to-psych-ward/
Absolutely, and her website was taken down .
But also there is the case of Dr Thomas Binder . The Swiss authorities have done the same to him , violent arrest and detention in a “sanatorium” . Haven’t been able to find a website covering it but think there is a Twitter link .
Where’s the “liberal“ media in all this ? Maybe some pigs are more equal than others .
I’d be careful with that story. I’ve read contradictory things about it (taken to psych ward by the police / no, she went there by herself / felt threatened by unknown persons / police still investigating / her lawyer’s approbation to be taken away / she apoligizes with the police). Not sure waht her role in this really is.
“Major real world physical threats don’t need PR departments and censorship to convince people of their danger. They don’t need falsely inflated fatality stats achieved by flagrant manipulation of the data”.
Wow. Beautifully articulated! This might be the best/most effective comeback to use on those folks who are resisting our efforts to open their eyes and minds, and who call us paranoid…
Have you read what your name sake Lulu was saying today about Bolsanaro leading the country to the slaughter house? Why is the old Leftie joining this worldwide conspiracy do you think? Was he as corrupt as the fascists claimed? Is Bolsanaro the wise man of truth in your eyes now? You could change your moniker to Jair, then we’d better understand where you are coming from.
Hello Paul,
Gosh. I really don’t understand what you have posted, in what I feel is a somewhat aggressive tone.
My ‘moniker’ is a family nickname for me, and I won’t be changing it, also I am honestly NOT the person who you say posted elsewhere about Bolsonaro.
Out of interest, would you please send me a link to the post you refer to, and copy/paste your reply to ‘the other Lulu’, who may/may not be deserving of your outrage?
Also an apology to me would be nice, eh?
The wrong Lulu? Well I am very sorry about that of course!
You’re forgiven 😉
The difference between the 14th Century “black death” or bubonic plague and the 21st “panic pandemic” is that the bubonic plague provided the stimulus for turning serfs into the economically middle-class, while the 21st Century panic pandemic is supplying the impetus for turning the middle-class into serfs. A reversal of fortune achieved by transferring trillions of middle-class wealth to the already uber-wealthy.
How could such a reversal of wealth occur in just a matter of weeks without a chaotic collapse. Let me introduce you to the “companions” hysteria, panic, and fear a useful trio frequently appearing on every mainstream media news outlet. A viral infection with a mortality rate no greater than the flu is being dramatized as a threat to all human life.
While this virus is busy transferring wealth it’s also warmongering like crazy, and it’s even powerful enough to call for heightened internet censorship. Wow, this is an omnipotent germ. Ludicrous pronouncements are being published saying: “Certain states routinely use disinformation as a policy tool, so the government is also stepping up its efforts to share its assessments on coronavirus disinformation with international partners. Working collaboratively has already helped make the UK safer, providing ourselves and our allies with a better understanding of how different techniques are used as part of malicious information operations – and how to protect against those techniques more effectively.”
ENEMIES BOTH VIRAL AND HUMAN
In any event, the state is determined to protect everyone in any number of ways from an assortment of
enemies both viral and human. By the way, whatever happened to the notion: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Over the last several decades the security state replaced the idea of being “fearless” to being fearful of everything. This fearfulness requires everyone to report and reject anyone who tries to allay the “official fear.”
The power of invoking fear is a form of social control. Fear generates panic allowing the ruling class to gain mass “acceptance” for policies which previously could never have been implemented–like transferring wealth from the Middle-class to the super-wealthy in a matter of days, or telling the population that all alternative views differing from the official narrative must be banned. Fear can even be used to manipulate panic stricken voters to cast a ballot for a crooked war criminal like Joe Biden, by saying he will save you from the scary Orange Boogeyman. In other words, fear causes populations to act irrationally, or in ways that only serve the interests of the ruling class.
One such instance of irrationality was directed at Graham Elwood’s Youtube Channel. Elwood, is a comedian/entertainer who does political commentary. He was all in a dither because google censored his last Sunday’s live stream and he couldn’t figure out why. One viewer suspected it was because Elwood suggested “eating a chocolate rabbit would cure COVID-19.” I guess, that’s what the NSA considers misinformation. My gosh, either censoring is done purely with “AI” or the moderators have absolutely no sense of humor. There’s nothing worse than an uptight apparatchik, or an inadequate useless algorithm……
Appreciate your excellent comments Charlotte. I saw a story today in the MSM here in Australia that Facebook and their vile little helpers Avaaz are going to be clamping down hard on ‘disinformation sites’ regards the virus.
Anyone who visits such sites (read non conformist anti establishment) will be directed to the WHO website and a warning message will pop up on your screen.
To be rolled out in the next few weeks.
Big Brother is now monitoring everything.
The security state is overtly telling everyone they’re watching all internet users and what websites they go to. The objective is to intimidate the public from doing their own research and coming across sites contradicting the officially narrative.
Only a truly authoritarian regime would suppress a persons right to information.
Exactly Charlotte. Well, they ain’t going to stop me from coming on OffG or Wrong Kind Of Green or Wrenchinthegears unless they take away my phone.
Unfortunately tho, it will stop other people from digging further, as you say. Fear is probably their biggest weapon against us.
What’s the point of the internet if it doesn’t provide alternative views. The security state’s intention is to turn the internet into another mainstream media news channel. The intelligence agencies, despise not having total control over all information. I guess, the guys at DARPA in the early 70’s never envisioned the technology they were developing would elevate the political consciousness of those they were suppressing.
Big Brother is now monitoring everything.
Big Brother is not monitoring everything. Big Brother is monitoring Facebook, because Facebook and Big Brother are the same thing.
It is one of the inexplicable mysteries of the universe, as to why anybody would imagine that Facebook is an appropriate venue for discussing dissident politics. What did they think was going to happen?
Was it their deliberate intention to never say anything that the ruling-class establishment might somehow perceive as threatening to their interests? If so, that’s not dissident politics, it’s a live-action role-playing game. But what isn’t, these days?
Great first para. We can’t blame only state security for being ‘fearful of everything’. This has come through schools, beginning at primary level, with the full support of helicopter parents. I mentioned yesterday how countries are reducing swimming pool deaths by telling children that water is dangerous. On the face of it that is true but it is zero-sum thinking.
Zer0-sum thinking pervades policy these days from dangerous dogs acts to climate policy but this virus is the best example yet. Viruses can be transmitted. So everybody stay away from each other. Close the borders. Under this policy, as pursued in NZ and a lesser degree, Australia, the moment an infected person enters the country they’re going to have to rush home to cower under the table – or stay there until a vaccine does or doesn’t materialize.
Limited thinking is indistinguishable from stupidity. The answer is to censor words like stupid and idiot and treat any criticism of state policy as subversion. This is why I call them the unintelligent services.
The hysterical mainstream media news not only avoids presenting alternative views they also want to control all “analogies.” A couple of weeks ago, Joe Scarborough, on “Morning Joe” had charts comparing COVID-19 mortality rates with the deaths of US soldiers in selective wars like Iraq and Afghanistan. How ludicrous, since Joe conveniently neglected to mention the millions in the Middle East who were slaughtered over the last two decades.
However, what’s even more ludicrous and illogical was Scarborough’s dismissal of “other commentators analogies,” who rightly note that many millions die from car accidents, strokes, and other numerous accidents and illnesses.
The insidious purveyors of the official narrative want to tell you how to analyze and compare statistics and to only accept their “orange and apple comparisons.”
The Black Death was not bubonic plague.
The Black Death or Plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, is believed to have been the cause; Y. pestis infection can cause septicaemic and pneumonic plagues but most commonly results in “bubonic plague.” This was especially the case in Europe where the plague peaked in the 14th Century.
Charlotte Ruse, you are simply repeating falsehood. In fact, not merely falsehood, but entirely implausible falsehood. The contemporary accounts of the Black Death are simply not consistent with bubonic plague. As you apparently believe the falsehood, here is a brief article pointing to the evidence: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17223184-000-did-bubonic-plague-really-cause-the-black-death/
You fail to understand the actual meaning up my post. I was not writing about the medical details of the Bubonic Plague (although the data I cited was correct).
It’s almost humorous that you feel the need (for some peculiar reason) to harp on a relatively unimportant point. I guess, by doing so you hope it will distract from the greater issue at hand, and that is–we’re losing personal liberty over a manufactured crisis designed to incite fear and frenzy. And this hysteria is hoping to garner public acceptance for heightened surveillance, internet censorship, and other insidious forms of social control.
Charlotte Russe, your response is bizarre. The Black Death was not bubonic plague. I pointed that falsehood out. You reasserted the falsehood, so I offered you detailed refutations, and your response is to claim that I am harping on a relatively minor matter. Well, it is minor if you consider accuracy to be unimportant, as you obviously do. As to your attribution to me of motive: just another example of you not being concerned with accuracy, but rather feeling free to just make stuff up.
I have repeatedly expressed concern about the ways in which the coronavirus is being exploited, both on this site and elsewhere. Here is just one example: https://viewsandstories.blogspot.com/2020/04/coronavirus-fascism.html
You’re remarks are ludicrous–please take a reading comprehension course so that you can better garner the intended meaning of a blogger’s comments.
Let me edit that comment–You’re ludicrous–please take a reading comprehension course so that you can better garner the intended meaning of a blogger’s comments
Steve, I once heard the Justinian plague blamed on a massive volcanic eruption, variously attributed to Krakatoa or Ilopango in El Salvador in the 530s CE, that caused a volcanic winter, and cooling in, among other places, Central Africa, that allowed some disease then endemic there to spread to Europe. The program blamed Yersinia, but that New Scientist article outlines a quite cogent case for a possible other pathogen. Perhaps a coronavirus-there’s an awful lot of bats in Central Africa, and even more then, I assume.
Dear me, Steve, that is sobering reading.
And here is a BMJ article, which is more detailed.
Early days to say the middle classes are being impoverished to make them serfs. Everything indicates that the wealthy white class are enjoying being isolated in their gardens saving large sums from their salaries still being paid. They will emerge stronger. Spare at least a little thought please to the working classes many of whom are forced by economic circumstances to continue to go to work and risk catching the virus when driving buses or serving behind counters. At least they still get a salary of sorts but many don’t and that fact is ignored. Debts grow. The eviction notices are piling up ready to be served in July or August. Can you imagine living with 3 kids and a depressed partner in a B+B room or a high rise flat? I don’t think the middle classes are in danger at all. It’s not unlike the 1930’s when if had work you were well off but if you didn’t then it was disaster.
I don’t know why you have the impression my post denied the plight of the working-class.
Everyone, except the super-wealthy living off a “fat inheritance” or financial investments are part of the working-class. No doubt, the working-poor are being hit the hardest. And that’s why the hyperbole about a virus proving to be less fatal than the flu is a social crime. You should save your ire, to those who are promoting this panic pandemic because they’re the real enemies of the working-class.
How does this apply only to the so-called by you ‘wealthy white class’? Are you one of those oikophobic people who help to push the anti-English agenda?
No. What on Earth is an oikophobic anti English agenda?
I think he meant ‘oink-ophobic’.
If you have difficult conceptualizing what it might be, ‘You Clap For Me Now’ will provide you with the answers. Along with the last 20 years of left-wing ‘white people are evil / anglo=racist’ discourse.
These ‘anti-disinformation’ operations are exposed in a good article I found through Moon of Alabama. Although the EU, the UK government, militaries on both sides of the Atlantic and the NATO- linked Atlantic Council all finance similar units – the quality of research is amateurish and very often deliberately misleading.
Government-funded propagandists actually lying about disinformation: https://irrussianality.wordpress.com/2020/04/08/exposing-the-disinformation-industry/
We all remember the case of the UK pensioner whom Sky News interviewed – after accusing his blog of being a Russian bot behind a “4000% increase in lies”. https://news.sky.com/video/are-you-a-russian-bot-11339530
The problem, unfortunately, is people: poor comprehension skills mean even university graduates struggle to tell advertorial from objective journalism. See the Stanford University study. That means they’re vulnerable to all kinds of marketing, propaganda and disinformation.
Search engines are biased and promote group think and filter bubbles – yes, even DuckDuck and StartPage manipulate the results you get to see. For now, I find Dogpile seems to give an unfiltered set of results.
“The problem, unfortunately, is people: poor comprehension skills mean even university graduates struggle to tell advertorial from objective journalism.”
And this is the bit that kills me in all of this. The realisation that people I know, who I previously credited with a certain level of intellect, are, in fact, only superficially intelligent. The shit that I have listened to from them and now don’t even bother engaging with is jarring.
Absolutely. So very disappointing to now view so many people differently from before…
I noticed duck duck go directing me towards google about 2 years ago. Just took everyone else this long to catch up
Idly looking for some plague poetry (as one does) I found this latter, which has a certain topicality
Mary Latter, ‘Soliloquy XVI’. Mary Latter (1725-77) was an English poet, essayist and playwright whose name has fallen out of the history books, but she gave us this dramatic evocation of living in a time of ‘Contagion’ (published in 1759). The soliloquy is reproduced in full below:
Now calumnies arise, and black Reproach
Triumphant croaks aloud, and joyful claps
Her raven wing! Insinuations vile
And slanderous spring from pestilential breath,
And tongues thrice dipped in hell. Contagion foul
Steams from th’ infernal furnace, hot and fierce,
And spreads th’ infectious influence o’er his fame!
Then each unworthy, ignominious fool,
Each female basilisk with forky sting,
And outward-seeming, heart-unmeaning tear
(Offspring most loathsome of Hypocrisy,
The vile, detested, double-damning sin:
Confusion and perdition overwhelm
And blast them, execrable, into ruin!),
Chin-deep in malice shoot their bitter darts
Of mockery and derision: adding, sly,
Th’ invidious wink, the mean, contemptuous leer,
And flouting grin, ‘emphatically scornful’.
Nor less th’ insidious knave, supremely dull!
Mixture of monkey, crocodile and mole,
Yet stupid as the ostrich, ass and owl;
In high redundance of Typhonic rage,
With harsh stentorian tone, disdainful, flings
Unmerited reflections, vehement, long,
Nonsensical and noisy. Vain, he struts
With domineering insolence replete,
And, lordly, tramples on distress in anguish.
For the record, I have no idea what the poem means other than that truth, as in war, is the first casualty. I apologise for being so off-topic, but felt that the poem must fit somewhere…
Thanks Hugh. Liked the ‘joyful claps’.
Possibly a lady to avoid at the dinner table though ? 🙂
JohnB, and God bless all who sail with you. The “joyful claps” resonated with the compulsory applause for the front line NHS heroes. The Raven Wing may be the lunatic ward?
Back then, “to clap” had the additional meaning “to give people gonorrhoea” or “the clap” although that meaning may not be present here.
as they say….It’s Warfare – therefore, communication, and the ability to transmit it – would be high on the list of targets – attrition – wearing down the enemy, ceaseless propoganda, coercion, deception, distraction, exhaustion…weaken – indoctrinate – dominate….in this case, the people.
Hancock has said it’s ‘too early for public engagement’ = how does he know? The man is a fool
Muck Handcroak…
Hmmm, ‘see-you-next-tuesday’ seems more apposite to me.
Talking of which, your comment seems to have attracted another one below…..!!
I posted some comment an hour or so ago about Karl Marx and the logic of capital accumulation that apparently got deleted. You fucking bastards create a website based on The Guardian doing the same kind of censorship but follow the same norms. I doubt that anything I ever posted here will get past you and your commenters’ conspiratorial fog so I bid you all farewell. Do yourself a favor and go march in some rightwing protest in England or wherever you live. Make sure to sidle up with someone with a runny nose while you’re at it. Only a bad cold, after all.
The comment in question is here . Mr P apparently did not refresh his browser before launching this tirade – Admin1.
It’s there, just refresh your browser.
Calm down Louis.
You’ll burst a bias valve.
Bye, liar.
Instead of insulting us you fake phoney…
if you even had a shred of basic decency, you’ll apologise to Vanessa Beeley for your revolting comments.
Oh, and get over your pathetic, petty jealousy about CJ Hopkins. It’s getting a bit embarrassing.
May I suggest a nice cup of camomile tea Louis, then a little lie down. Toodle pip old chum.
State Proyect starting to lose it…
Posted on April 17 2020 at 1:53 am. Remember that. Any Louis posts dated later will tell an interesting story by their very appearance.
He’s just trying to cheer us all up.
No, Louis! Please don’t leave us! Pleeeease?!?
Oh, alright, then. See ya! ;o)
I have a feeling that – to paraphrase Schwarzenegger – he’ll be back!
Hasta la vista, Louis!
I bid you all farewell.
don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out, as the saying goes.
This government directive suggests to me that the ultimate objective will be to silence websites such as the one we have here. The excuse being made concerning the spread of “malicious information” can be translated as alternative information which runs contrary to this government’s Covid-19 propaganda and as such undermines their credibility. I do hope we can formulate a plan B otherwise we will be up shit creek without a paddle. One thing we can all do is to stop paying the BBC “licence fee” as you contribute directly to their malignant spread of disinformation.
Shift to US hosting
Use VPNs if necessary, the opera browser has a free one built in.
They’ll be playing wack-a-mole all day and all night.
The Torah is little but a tedious genealogy and a litany of Holy massacres and killings.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/joshua/
He wants them under tighter control, he wants them more reliant on him for food and hope. He sees profit for himself, or increased power. Or he truly believes he is saving the people from themselves.
—
You portray a capitalist class that is using the pandemic to do what? To get even richer? How does shutting down factories and shops benefit the ruling class? Trump tried to get the major owners of capital in the USA to get behind his back-to-work movement. This is how they reacted:
Beyond the haphazard nature of the call, senior bankers are getting increasingly frustrated with Trump’s approach to the crisis. They say pressure tactics to reopen the economy as fast as possible make no sense if the virus isn’t fully under control and consumers and businesses don’t feel safe to resume anything close to normal activities.
“I really don’t understand how they are communicating on this,” one CEO told POLITICO on condition that neither they nor their firm be named for fear of angering the White House. “He’s got to stop talking about turning the economy back on and start talking about making people feel safe, things that are happening around testing and the health care system. That’s the only way you will really get the economy reopened over a period of time.”
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly-coronavirus-special-edition/2020/04/15/closing-time-488927
I understand that Karl Marx has little purchase here but really you need to familiarize yourself with V. 1 of Capital.
…who are told how to think and act by the media…
Which is all owned by the cabal…
It’s all showbiz, including Trump.
You’re a bundle of laughs Louie. I know whenever I’m looking for a “Marxist perspective” on why I should believe the latest completely fabricated Western regime-change propaganda – I go right to you and all your “regime-change progressive” buddies over at CounterPuff.
Let me see if I’ve properly updated my list of staunchly anti-imperialist authors (who faithfully challenge Western propaganda) whom you so called “progressives” over at CounterPuff have now disappeared. At current count I have: Andre Vltchek, Diana Johnstone, Edward Curtain, C.J. Hopkins and John Steppling. Who needs a “virus” when you boys are on the job eh?
Now that tp is in such short supply one would think that there would be a use for CounterPuff… but not really. Boy does one miss the halcyon days of Alexander Cockburn.
The factories and shops closed is the perfect opportunity to automate the factories and do away with bricks and mortar shops altogether.
Human workers are a drag on profits and physical shops are obsolete as well as encouraging the the wrong kind of consumer agency.
Besides didn’t you know that there was all sorts of economic activity that wasn’t in the hands of the big corporations?
I know, crazy right? Not for much longer.
Get with the programme. It’s a new paradigm!
It’s been referenced elewhere but Cory Morningstar wrote an excellent piece on this, a long read but very informative. It begins with a comment from a recent Andrew Yang speech:
“Many Americans will not have jobs to return to after the coronavirus pandemic ends…”
“We’re going to see something like 10 years of change in 10 weeks…”
“The fact is right now this virus is the perfect environment for companies to get rid of people, bring in robots and machines, and figure out how they can operate more efficiently.”
http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2020/04/13/covid-19-as-a-weapon-the-crushing-of-the-disposable-working-class-by-design/
You have read my mind. At what point do people in the US (say outside NYC, but maybe even there) ‘do you know anyone that died?’ Or, do they ever? Here is a real kicker, a Scientist from my former group, lives in Padua, and told me that he didn’t know a single person who was sick! He’s ~35.
Appart from a few anecodatal stories, the wife and I know of no confirmed infections of covid let alone hospitalisations.
Iin London I know of 2 confirmed cases personally and many unconfirmed including me, as no tests are made available to yhe public.
That is a deliverate ploy.
Todays Gnus, 14 care home deaths, coronvirus symptoms…
Get that “symptoms”…
Haven’t you heard that being alive is a coronvirus symptom?
Exactly. These stories abound “I don’t know anybody sick let alone dead therefore the whole thing is untrue” is not good logic and flies in the teeth of the figures – check out death rates at Northwick Park , Ealing and West Middx hospitals. No they probably don’t know the victims personally but that doesn’t mean ‘it’s all made up’.
No, not untrue…exaggerated wildy.
Surely, for the unpresidented action by the state, one would expect one measely hospital admission to be seen somewhere in thousands of connections we have.
None, not one, not a sniff.
And, the hospitals have been shown to be well, well under capacity, plenty of time for nurses and doctors to dance about for some youtube action.
So, please stop your all very, very obvious dissembling, thanks in advance.
I’d be interested to know how you think you were infected?
L.
In a busy Liddl or a social environment- pubs – either by playing cards with a variety of people and the physical transmission then, by handling the cards and chips and touching eyes there after or transfer to mouth by smoking or eating a snack without washing hands.
Or just being in close proximity in a crowded saturday night at local or shop when peeps were sneezing in late January.
There is a less of a chance of having picked it up by use of mobile phone from or public transport or using cash point but I don’t rule it out.
How long have you had symptoms? I ask because I wonder how people are getting it during social distancing etc. I thought it incubated for about a week, then displayed symptoms and about a week later you either got better or a lot worse.
I had symptoms from around mid Feb to mid March – i’d say at keast 4 weeks probably 6 or longer.
Pre fever there was a sensation of some balance issue/light headed moments which i put down to blocked ears. Since then other friends have reported a similar feeling.
I was otherwise fine until the fever hit- it felt malarial, hot and cold within minutes all night long and soaked sheets and pillows.
That lasted for about 5 days bad and got less over the week after.
My body felt hotter than usual though there was no fever, bowels and urine felt warmer than ever, felt like a diet of non stop vindaloos! Limbs too.
Had stopped sneezing pretty quickly by the second week but the above symptoms and general lowering of stamina persisted till about 3 or 4 weeks ago.
No dry cough or sore throat – hot around eyes and bunged up feeling.
It was not like any cold or flu I have had in decades!
Ah, ok thanks. I thought you’d caught it during lockdown.
Isolation as we have is not going to totally halt transmission. It is way too late to do that. It can only be done by geographic isolation very early – either of the infected area or from the rest of the world until the virus has infected everyone it could and is no longer transmitting.
Just consider that even with the spreading lockdown in March , and a 50% reduction, Heathrow alone had over 3 million passenger journeys,
https://simpleflying.com/heathrow-passenger-number-drop/
True. So it’s inoculation or herd immunity and this was all to save overloading the NHS, who it seems, couldn’t do much anyway.
I always thought the first thing they should have done was close airports.
Close airports, close Football and Rugby matches, introduce masks, do basic fever testing, have clear guidelines thence for self isolation and contact tracing, build up supplies of ppe, and manage the spread of infection to keep increasing herd imminity and without overloading the ICU system and the specialist staff.
Testing is purposely not being done.
Vaccines will not be provable safe until full trials are done to prove their long term safety never mind efficacy.
I won’t be accepting any for at least 2 years and likely longer. A cure worse than the illness.
Many fewer will be shown to have needed to die and their deaths and funerals not been in cruel isolation.
But just like the decades of NHS underfunding and Austerity and Brexit, all of the above has been about MONEY for the benefit of the bankers and hedge funds and delivered by their populist rabble rousers and full spectrum propaganda and intentional confusion.
It really is that simple.
Believing lies is a habit and when the rug is pulled the liars achieve the final victory – people will never admit they were fooled and they will ttust others less.
That’s interesting – I had some odd, but very mild, symptoms about a month ago. Fatigue, light headedness, urinary discomfort. I thought it was old age but maybe not. Maybe it’s been around for ages and has been high jacked to suit the agenda of those that seek to control
Its been around since probably december/january in London.
You can also catch it from thinking about other people.
Lol the world famous Harry Potter wizard curse favoured by Off-G recently, voodoo or as i prefer to think of it the black spot! Ooh arr Jim lad we’re doooooomed!
But that’s meaningless in the face of many doctors in N Italy who have anecdotal stories of the bodies piling up in town. Some 80 have themselves died there – dies your friend deny that?
Was that not exposed as a media hoax…
The Italian Deaths were covered in the offg article…
The virus is real. But the everything that is attributed to the virus is highly exaggerated. Covid19 is nothing more than seasonal flu
Just a regular bug declared to be a booga booga, my thoughts exactly.
A corona virus is not a ‘flu.
Most coronaviruses cause minor cold like symptoms or no symptoms at all. Three are claimed to produce more severe illness in a minority of those affected, SARS, MERS and SARS-COV-2.
SARS-COV-2 is reckoned to be the least infectious and dangerous of the three. According to the WHO 80-99% of those infected will have no symptoms or minor symptoms.
So, yes, it is not the flu. It’s quite considerably milder.
Not for everybody. The kill rate among the elderly and those with co-morbidities is rather higher. It is simply too early to declare it ‘considerably milder’ than ‘the ‘flu’, and which ‘flu are you referring to?
in 2020 CV was so deadly it even stopped terrorist attacks
And mass shootings as the psychopaths self quarantine
– psychopaths
+ spooks/spook patsies
Is the main motive from the Lord of the Manor to give we ungrateful and riotous plebs a boot up the rear. We sure do need it from His perspective…
Or is there a deeper motive?
Is this then an act of desperation that once the hoax is fully exposed in the full light of day will destroy the reputations of many, not least of all the NHS.
In order to bring about change, the edifacies of society must be destroyed. It has been said, that nothing brings about this desired change as quickly as war. This hoax could beat that record.
The image of the tracing board of the first degree of freemasionry. Note the checkerboard pattern representing the chess board, the game ‘they’ play with us…
There is a spiritual element behind all of this,
Ephesians 6:12
I think you are right in suggesting what is happening in the world is indeed a “spiritual battle” in the sense that the public is being forced to decide what exactly they believe in and who they should therefore allow to govern them.
The public has for too long mostly voted with their wallets instead of their principles and thus they have put people who believe in money and not justice into power, and therefore they have reaped what they have sown, collectively speaking.
Just as when the Germans supported Hitler, by the support they gave him, they created their own downfall.
For example in 2017 the public had a chance to put Jeremy Corbyn into power, who would have created more economic equality, but too many chose greed, voting with their wallets as usual, because they did not want to share their wealth via the tax system with others poorer whom they thought undeserving.
So now they have had yet more dictatorship in the form of this lockdown, which I am not insisting Jeremy Corbyn might not have also carried out in the same circumstances, but I very much doubt he would have done it without a vote and a proper debate in parliament as Boris Johnson did, or effectively criminalise people for simply being out alone in places they couldn’t possibly infect people (or at least have an extremely small risk of doing so), which again, Boris Johnson did.
Corbyn is just part of the charade.
He’s part of the fiasco, I’ll give you that.
Jeremy Corbyn’s problem was that he believed in democracy too much by allowing his party to effectively decide all the policies instead of leading them, like the disgraceful Tony Blair did, whereas Boris Johnson’s problem is he believes in democracy too little, to the point he doesn’t even debate in parliament putting the whole country in prison, and possibly causing economic catastrophe in the process.
The “lone gunman” Tony Blair had the support of the entire establishment, minus a few liberals when He teamed up with the Bush Baby.
Boris Johnson is remembered by a former colleague as “never likely to lead the Torys because of His raging Europhilia”.
Hegalianism. Fake. All.
And barely a whisper in the MSM about the eco-collapse that is happening all around us>>
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/15/abrupt-ecosystem-collapse/
The human toll here won’t be measured in percentage points.
They’ll just do a head count of those who survive.
We’ve almost managed to kill the largest living Life form on the planet (the Great Barrier Reef).
To pretend we are seperate from the Earth is the ultimate hubris.
THIS is what the psychopaths are distracting us from>>
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/16/a-scourge-on-the-earth/
Flannery had it half right.
We are eating our children’s future.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2015/12/discovering-maurice-strong/
Nonsense. At what point will you all wake up to the fact the climate hoax is run by the same people, with the same goals? There is NO SCIENCE behind the AGW hoax. It is stunningly obvious with even a few hours of open-minded research of the basic lack of logic and data underpinning the assumptions. It is so BAD, the corruption runs so deep, you will not believe you were fooled for so long…I was. I love the way ‘socialist’ ecozealots conveniently blank out the backgrounds of key figures behind it; the money, the power. The sort of people you otherwise rail against. How’s the cognitive dissonance? I ask the same question posed by the author…if AGW were true, WHY THE NEED TO QUASH ALL DISSENT? To invent a term ‘denier’ when the very ESSENCE of science is hard skepticism? At this late stage it is embarrassing that anyone with a brain hasn’t figured this out. CC has been set up beautifully to segue with THIS hoax which is intended to introduce a surveillance system. Just wait for ‘carbon’ rationing.
Surveillance of who, or what?
We are INSIGNIFICANT in the eyes of the ruling class. They don’t give a shit what you or I are doing, unless we’re standing outside their homes with a bazooka.
Been to the reef lately?
It’s fucked.
Someone who relies on the CIA rag, Quadrant for their information is beyond argument.
Get real.
Quadrant is a PR mag for the mining industry.
And originally funded by the CIA.
Not just ‘originally’.
Er – **open-minded** scepticism is the true essence of the scientific method. That’s to say: The scepticism is mild enough for you to be able to espouse well-tested hypotheses, but always provisionally. Despite provisional agreement with such hypotheses, graduated by multiple, replicable experiments to the status of theories, the scepticism remains open permanently, and thus is always prepared to re-think, whenever new, reasonably-verifiable facts come to light.
This is a hyper-rational, Vulcan state of mind, which the essentially-non-rational, emotion-dominated psychology of human Earthlings really hates! Tremendous difficulty, always, in sticking to it. Even professional scientists fail quite often, and become dawkinsoid scientismist bigots, attempting to defend their most-prized dogmas against experimental/observed results which contradict them. They find such re-thinking emotionally upsetting enough to abandon cool, steady reason and to begin gibbering emotional denunciations – poor loves! :O)
AGW may or may not be a thing. Currently, no religiously-dogmatic certainty – either way! – is justified. Time will tell.
Oh and – er – how is socialism in any way connected to this syndrome, exactly…?
Open-minded scepticism rools, OK!
Science is innately sceptical and falsifiable. Denialism, in total contrast, is an ideological crusade to deny, science, evidence and commonsense (ask any gardener if the climate is changing)in pursuit of ideological and pecuniary interests.
Out of curiosity, how can AGW be falsified?
To quote the CIA rag, Quadrant renders your contribution laughable. But then there is the content, a series of truly ludicrous Dunning-Krugerite idiocies. The raving reactionary abuse of ‘socialists’ exposes the hard Right ideology that is behind ALL ecological collapse denialism, because the reality of ecological collapse is the great, unanswerable, condemnation of capitalism’s insatiable greed.
Well said. The third bleaching of the GBR in the last five years received very little attention, for one day, but now an idiot plan to ‘cool’ the Reef by spraying water into the air, to form heat reflective droplets, from ONE barge, gains extensive coverage. The imminent ecological collapse makes me suspect that CoVid 19 might be the killer app that the Gods Upon the Earth must deploy one day, soon, or the world will be irreparably damaged by the ‘useless eaters’. The fact that three strains of CoVid19 have been identified, allegedly arising from mutations since last September, and the dire intoning that it might become a seasonal cold, like other coronaviruses, but ‘much more deadly’ because of this high tendency to mutate, strikes me as very sinister, indeed.
[Has this tendency to mutate been demonstrated to be a unique property of nCov2, not shared by other viruses? -Ed]
Just seen a news story on the vile ABC here in Australia: ‘Facebook users who interact with information deemed false by Facebook’s factcheckers will be directed to the WHO website.
Warning messages will begin popping up in the next few weeks the story said.
Not only that, but the fake ‘activist group’ Avaaz will be helping the Powers That Be in tracking down misinformation on the virus. And we know who Avaaz are, don’t we?
Cory Morningstar at Wrong Kind Of Green has done detailed research into groups like Res Publica, Avaaz, Change.com, etc, and how they were started up.
As I’ve said numerous times, gatekeepers everywhere.
It’s not unlike the suppression of contrary opinion seen right here
Paul, with respect, perhaps you need to open your eyes more? I’ve actually seen quite a number of contrary opinions being freely expressed here over the last 4 weeks. Including from quite long term commenters.
Go back thru some of the articles and check for yourself.
OffGuardian does Not censor or suppress people. If they did, I wouldn’t be here replying to you now.
How exactly is down voting or disagreeing with comments people disagree with ‘suppression of contrary opinion’ ?
It’s called participating in a discussion. If you want bold one-sided ‘statements of fact’ with no questioning or discussion allowed you have a huge number of corporate and state controlled TV stations and newspapers out there to go to. Please don’t go throwing false allegations around here.
Does anyone know of a paper or report describing the death by SARS-CoV-2 of a child or a young person you GOOD HEALTH?
The Synagogue of Satan has a problem –
China on course to become ‘world’s most Christian nation’ within 15 years
The number of Christians in Communist China is growing so steadily that it by 2030 it could have more churchgoers than America
By Tom Phillips, Liushi, Zhejiang province
2:00PM BST 19 Apr 2014
It is said to be China’s biggest church and on Easter Sunday thousands of worshippers will flock to this Asian mega-temple to pledge their allegiance – not to the Communist Party, but to the Cross.
The 5,000-capacity Liushi church, which boasts more than twice as many seats as Westminster Abbey and a 206ft crucifix that can be seen for miles around, opened last year with one theologian declaring it a “miracle that such a small town was able to build such a grand church”.
The £8 million building is also one of the most visible symbols of Communist China’s breakneck conversion as it evolves into one of the largest Christian congregations on earth.
“It is a wonderful thing to be a follower of Jesus Christ. It gives us great confidence,” beamed Jin Hongxin, a 40-year-old visitor who was admiring the golden cross above Liushi’s altar in the lead up to Holy Week.
“If everyone in China believed in Jesus then we would have no more need for police stations. There would be no more bad people and therefore no more crime,” she added.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10776023/China-on-course-to-become-worlds-most-Christian-nation-within-15-years.html
“Seventy Years of U.S. Destabilisation in China. U.S. Sponsored Uyghur Insurgency in Xinjiang
China’s exit in October 1949, from the sphere of US control, was perhaps the heaviest blow to strike American post-World War II global hegemony. China’s successful drive for independence had been anticipated in Washington for many months.
In September 1948, the far-sighted American diplomat George Kennan noted that “there are considerable limitations on what we can do to affect the course of events in China”. Over the elapsing seven decades since, the scale of American influence in China’s domestic affairs has been restricted at best, but continues apace nonetheless. Washington has implemented a range of policies in the hope of destabilising and splintering China…………”
https://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-sponsored-uyghur-insurgency-in-xinjiang-70-years-of-u-s-destabilisation-in-china/5698425
Gullibility has no limits.
The Chineses outrank all races in terms of intelligence, that will include occidentals.
Chinese…
IQ and retention do not correlate with wisdom and experience.
The sadists who designed nuclear weapons, cluster bombs, napalm, depleted uranium weapons etc etc were all ‘smart’.
And empty inside.
Chinese History and the Bible by Steven Liu
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=steven+liu+bible+story
One day you go out to get water for your seven healthy, but quite hungry, children, and you see a stranger on the village green.
“This plague has a R-naught – If the reproduction number of one were to go up to 1.1, the stranger said, your health system could be overwhelmed by the end of the year. If it were to go up to 1.2, hospitals could reach a crisis point in a few months and if it went up to 1.3 the crisis point would come in next month. If it went upto 1.5 you’re f*****d, if it went to 2 , i’m f*****d, if it goes over 2 – we’re all f*****g f****d!
“it’s nothing but the normal winter fever, and you have nothing to fear”.
Yeah, yeah.
Covid19 r-number is around 2.2. But 80-99% of those infected will be symptom-free or get a mild cold.
Flu ranges from 0.9-2.8 and produces a more severe illness in a higher percentage of the infected. It also regularly overwhelms health systems.
Your reaction is hysterical not rational
Gosh No1 – hope you are getting some sleep, 4.20 am!
Well i’m just up and having my first cuppa so will take a moment to warm up .
Right – you just quoted a R-naught of 2.2!!!
For where?
From where?
Please do cite it so we can all confirm for ourselves.
I agree totally with you about the flu stats.
What has that got to do with SARS-CoV-2 virus pandemic?
Looking foreword to a reply.
I suggest that you take up the hysteria and rationality levels with a real expert scientist and politician and leader, who has access to the facts and compare your own levels of rationality and hysteria thereby independently.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/16/angela-merkel-draws-on-science-background-in-covid-19-explainer-lockdown-exit
Ah – time for a second cuppa and bit of catching up on the imagined deaths around the world.
England has turned into a shithole of magnificent proportions
https://www.anti-empire.com/uk-police-accuse-journalist-of-killing-people-for-filming-them-in-a-park/
It’s fucking absurd and people need to start speaking up. Unfortunately, our cages have become too comfortable.
Just another piece of evidence that states with authoritarian tendencies and their minions are using Covid-19 as an excuse to roll back democracy.
Police arrogance is soaring into the stratosphere, as one of the few groups able to move freely in lockdown. They probably think they are immune from catching or transmitting the virus. I bet they are not…
The US government have become terrified by the job losses which are far in excess of what they can fund, which is why they are reversing the house arrest, ASAP. In a few more week the US would be in flames if they don’t either stop the unemployment or fund the impoverished.
Yes, let people go hungry in the US and you will have a very large population going insane with rage. I think if they bring in the National Guard against any citizens the mask will be removed enough for mass resistance. They don’t want this at any cost. The elites don’t like chaos and they need to keep at least a few plebes to supply them with food and luxury goods.
i dunno. theyve been preparing for this for years. decades maybe.
I would think so but they are not all-powerful and have their blind spots. The Tsarist secret police was quite efficient, had all the revolutionary groups infiltrated etc. The trouble was that other parts of the state were not, and World War 1 exposed their flaws mercilessly.
One Tsarist police report even warned of a possible suicide attack on the Tsar’s palace using a bomb-laden aircraft – the first aircraft had only been invented a few years before! Their imagination anticipated 9/11 by nearly a century. But it was to no avail.
The key question, as the East German nomenklatura discovered with a big shock, is: ‘Will the state forces actually fire on their fellow USAmericans, when ordered to do so?’ When it came to the critical point, the East German paratroopers refused the order to kill their fellow-Germans, and – as Chris Hedges likes to put it: “Honecker was gone within a week!”
Some state thugs will follow orders always. But the key question is: what percentage will say no? It only takes a critical mass, not even a majority. If they start turning their guns on the willing killers…
Especially in a country where ‘the right to keep and bear arms’ is still widely observed.
In Eastern Europe the governments surrendered without slaughtering their people. Throughout the US Empire’s ‘backyard’, Latin America, the compradore elites slaughter, terrorise, torture and massacre the people with relish, at any opportunity, fully supported by the USA.
The East German example is an optimistic one, but it can go differently, as in Tiananmen Square.
Also, I believe what happened in East Germany was the Gorbachev made it clear that the USSR would not intervene, unlike Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Humgary 1956 was an attempted coup by outright fascists, who got their just desserts.
Aha, Uncle Joe’s little nephew, with equally “interesting” views on Tiananmen Square.
So what about Prague, 1968? Do you claim that Alexander Dubček was another fascist?
Ah! Do we think we know the whole story of Tiananmen, then? I see radically-differing accounts of what happened, all of them Western, and therefore not likely to be particularly insightful – or honest – when it comes to China. Probably more likely that we can get a clearer picture of the fall of the DDR.
NOTHING occurred in Tian An Men Square. Around the Square hundreds were killed as the usual violent climax of Colour Revolutions (see Kiev, Belgrade, Tbilisi etc)was launched, and crushed. Many dupes were sacrificed to the Holy Cause of ‘Bringing China Down’, but the Chinese Government proved strong. That the rabble are so brainwashed as to believe OUTRIGHT lies like the ‘Tian An Men Square Massacre’, ‘The Srebrenica Genocide’, ‘ Saddam’s WMD’ etc is a testament to brainwashed stupidity and pig ignorance.
The NVA was a draft army (as was the Bundeswehr). Guys shooting their protesting neighbours, uncles, parents? No! But this weak spot has been taken care of. No more draft, only volunteers. Who don’t even have to be German.
“Professional” armies may have fewer qualms about mowing down the citizenry. Also many police in many countries often seem to be a caste apart, subtly contemptuous of mere civilians.
As the French Revolution unfolded the only part of the armed forces that firmly stuck by the monarchy were the Swiss Guards, and they were often selected from German-speaking cantons of Switzerland, so their interaction with the people of Paris was limited. And they were also less susceptible to being influenced. They did fire on crowds of revolutionaries but were ultimately massacred.
One way or another there will be flames. But lockdowns cannot go on forever.
I suspect that unacknowledged or unrecognized fears around their own mortality on the part of boomers was the key to generating the panic. Even if you tell them the chance they might die is ridiculously low they don’t care.
They think nothing of the financial devastation this lock-down will lead to.
Say what you want about Trump but I have had four boomers – retired, house paid-off, with pensions & investments galore – tell me to my face that if this is what it takes to get Trump out of office it’s worth it.
The selfishness is off the chart. I’m 60 and I’m disgusted by them.
Here in Canada I’ve noticed it’s older people, retired, capable of staying home as much as they’d like who are gleefully posting about calling the snitch lines on people they see out in the street, and approving the new fines being given to people who spend “too much time” on park benches. Indefinite lockdown may be fine for them, they no longer have to work for their income, but the younger people who’d very much like to get back to work are being thrown under the bus, and when we complain we’re told we’re heartless. I think it’s pretty heartless of them to think nothing of tanking the economy and putting younger generations in a desperate situation when they won’t be around as long as we are to suffer the consequences of all this “safety.”
Here in Australia I’ve noticed the opposite – it’s younger people who are howling loudest for shutdowns, dobbing in people etc. I see more retired people out walking, too. Some older people I know (not all, but many) have a more realistic understanding of mortality and risk than the young and don’t want to be deprived of the right to enjoy the remainder of their lives as best they can. The younger generations grew up with the safety culture, not baby boomers.
Not necessarily focusing on the boomers. Most DEMS would let Bill Gates inject a random unknown substance into their brain than have Trump elected again. They’d rather see military rule than have Trump elected again. Not that I view Trump as any sort of competent leader, but let’s start to perceive things clearly can we? If Trump is going after WHO, I support him. If he’s ready to open things up, I support him. Whoever wants to arrest Bill Gates, I support them. If a party can have human rights restored again, I support them. Right now the DEMS are looking like latte-sipping Nazis to me.
Most DEMS would let Bill Gates inject a random unknown substance into their brain than have Trump elected again.
~~~~~
Too true …. LOL
Meh. Apportioning blame by age, sex, skin colour, or political leaning is a mug’s game.
right, you shouldn’t blame the fascists, because that would be anti-fascist.
Divide and conquer Olga. I’m a boomer and totally against this lockdown. My children are out of work, young people I know are out of work. Not about Trump at all.
At 60 I’m technically a boomer too – as are a great many of my peeps who are equally horrified at what is being done to the economy.
Between my 3 kids and the 2 partners one is laid-off and one has had her hours drastically cut. I myself have been furloughed and my Airbnb business has vanished.
The “fear”, IMO, is on a spectrum that runs between the “virus” and the “response”.
Some appear to be deathly afraid of dying – or are not ready to see their 98 year old parent pass – which I see as immature and selfish.
Others appear to appreciate that shutting down the economy to this extent will have long term effects that will haunt and possibly kill millions more than the virus ever would.
Apparently it takes a village to raise a kid up until the elderly are asked to take one for the team – and then it’s throw the kids under the bus.
We thought when we saw/read about Winston being made to exercise in 1984 was something that could never happen in a million years. The Big Brother/NHS Two Minute Love now is immeasurably more sinister and concerning and its not going away soon. Especially as Big Brother/NHS deny services to the needy to pretend they are overwhelmed
I have a hard time seeing Johnson as Big Brother, but he’s been smart in linking himself so closely with the NHS that a clap for the NHS can be seen indirectly as a clap for him (by some people, anyway). I’m told that a lot of people think he’s doing a good job…
“Government is the Entertainment division of the military-industrial complex.”
– Frank Zappa –
(December 21, 1940 – December 04, 1993)
I use this quote slot. I fear it has morphed into “Government is the kapo of the ruling technocrats.”
I love Frank’s wisdom…
stupid is the most prevalent’.
my MP has told people who do not have nor can use computers that he will put regular updates for them on his website
Interesting take on the “counterculture” including St Francisco at
http://centerforaninformedamerica.com/
Check out the Laurel Canyon material.
David McGowan — The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation
Catte, your opening story about the Black Death brought me a chuckle of recognition. Just the other day, I was having this argument with a friend, and I told him: “Look, if this were a real plague, would we actually be here arguing about whether it was happening? People we knew would be dropping dead!” It’s such an obvious point, yet sadly it failed to make any impression on him. 🙁
People just don’t want to believe that we live in a world where ‘authority’ figures and ‘experts’ would lie to them. They find that idea more disturbing than any torture, it seems. It’s just like abused children who can’t admit to themselves that their parents, on whom they rely for everything, are actually cruel abusers. They would actually rather believe that they themselves deserved the abuse. So sad …
I cannot recall a time when ‘authority figures’ did anything but lie.
The Black Death ! Who the he’ll suddenly decided to bring that into the conversation?
‘ People just don’t want to believe that we live in a world where ‘authority’ figures and ‘experts’ would lie to them.’
They also don’t want to know that they are clueless
The combination clueless and lying seems most disastrous to me. Still, that is what leaders and experts do, as long as the groupthink allows them to do this…
Totally agree – children have to believe it’s their fault not their abusers because the truth is terrifying for them on an existential level. The majority of the general public have been brainwashed into a state of permanent childhood emotionally. This has been going on for years and now it’s being used to control
People would rather believe that those in authority are their rescuers. Rescuing them from what has been imposed on them in the first place
I think its always good to remind people that so far this virus has infected approx. 0.15% of the population. Just bear in mind that when comparing things like the black death.
It boggles the mind that we have taken the action we have with something that has affected less than 1% of the population.
I also continue to wonder why a govt that willingly invokes a D notice on the media to suppress a story it doesn’t like never took any action to prevent the hysteria that has been coming out of the Daily Mail, GMB and the BBC everyday. That I find interesting. It seems a similar situation to that of America although Trump is far more dismissive of the media. They know where they stand with him and they know he doesnt like or trust them. The feeling is obviously mutual. Here we have a cowering executive to weak and unwilling to face the attack dogs of the likes of Morgan and Robinson.
Ever since it lost control of the agenda and acted against its own best instincts and imposed this lockdown it has been at the mercy of the media agenda. That is not leadership. It exposes the vacuity and the weakness at the heart of govt.
Perhaps we need to wait until 10% and more of the population have been infected, those who are doomed, die, those who ‘recover’ are assessed for long-lasting effects like liver damage, renal failure and neurological and cardiac conditions (ACE2 receptors are pretty ubiquitous, and the virus uses other receptors to infect, among others, killer T-cells and erythrocytes)and we see if ‘immunity’ lasts a life-time, or just a year or two. As for hysteria-that is designed to foment a frenzy of hatred against China, in preparation for the great ‘Clash of Civilizations’ war to ensure Western global ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’.
[The vast majority of cases exhibit mild flu-like symptoms, this is supported by the majority of evidence from almost every reliable source. If you are going to make strong statements like these regarding the supposed exotic nature of the virus, its long-lasting effects or its behaviour, as distinct from other similar viruses, please cite sources. Thanks -Ed]
All this unemployment engineered by our security service owned media and the deep state is a gift for the far-right. Finally the USA will be able to break up Europe with fascist states, like they did south America, and also have a real dictatorship at home.
Thank you again OffG for your calm reasoning these last 6 weeks, however most of us here saw this coming ages ago.
Any site that questions ‘official narrative’ and the ‘officially mandated experts’ will be targeted by the State and its Security apparatus. Its becoming more and more like Newspeak.
We’ve seen blatant censorship ramped up in the last few years: Facebook, Twitter, numerous sites being demonetised, other sites coming under repeated DDoS attacks, like OffG for example.
The denial of our freedom of speech will now be increased to a much greater extent. Your above story with links makes that very clear.
It’s bad enough so many people across the World are marching in synchronised lockstep with various Govts, and snitching on their neighbours.
How many people here know about Samizdat?
I like the sound of a decentralised ‘Samizdat’ And the name says it all. Sounds correct. Ticks many boxes. I’d like to know.
The way things are heading, with the crackdown on dissenting voices, Samizdat may well make a return, especially now with blanket digital surveillance and collection of vast amounts of data.
Everything becomes more and more surreal Watt.
Like the non conspiracy AND ACTING Carefully INTEL WHICH LEAD TO wmd 911 iraq Afghanistan Libra Syria
and David Kelly non conspiracy AND ACTING Carefully suicide
great article
As all the experts that tour the studios of the MSM will tell you, there is nothing better than an establishment question-asker (I will not use the term ‘journalist’).
All well and good to underline the message, which is being lapped up by just about everyone.
However, this Spectator article makes it very clear that the entire government shut down was based on the flimsiest advice you can imagine, and that the advisor who is now touring the studios in all his pomp and glory, Neil Ferguson, has a very very bad track record:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/six-questions-that-neil-ferguson-should-be-asked
Where does Ferguson live ? I think people should throw eggs at him.
There’s no question freedom of speech and expression has been under attack for a long time, even at a time when stuff that really offends a lot of people – like constant use of the f word on TV or in films, and a lot of pretty gratuitous sex and violence, which if you really want to see that you can apparently find on a porn site somewhere or at a cage fighting exhibition – is constantly shoved in people’s faces, and quite often very unexpectedly.
It seems *some people* are very much allowed “freedom of expression” however much others don’t like it, but when one tries to tell the truth about things that really matter, important to everybody’s life, it risks being regarded by the authorities as “offensive” or even “criminal.”
Another serious point being, that apparently in America freedom of expression is written in to the First Amendment to the Constitution, and though the Supreme Court apparently has certain powers to interpret that negatively, it generally does not do so to date it appears.
But that is not necessarily the case in Europe and the UK, and it appears using “Emergency powers” most governments can overrule rights in general, which right to publicly assemble for example is also granted under the US constitution.
Which fundamental constitutional right is of course is very at odds with the lockdown, and because the Americans take for granted these very loudly trumpeted and long lasting rights, there is already a certain amount of demonstration and defiance of the laws on public assembly, which if the lockdown goes on much longer, will undoubtedly get a lot greater.
As far as I can tell, the freedom of expression rights in the UK really got trampled upon by the laws introduced during the Tony Blair era or as is said that of “political correctness.”
The Blair government made an enormous number of new laws, unprecedented until that time in British history, and perhaps it is no surprise as both Mr Blair and his barrister wife were both lawyers, as were their good buddies, the Clintons, in America.
The public really needs to look far harder at the background of politicians before voting for them and therefore giving them power.
e.g. Monsieur Macron was a Rothschild Banker, so as a human being apparently chiefly interested in money, and not in people, and in particular, the finances of the rich, what else could have been expected of him but to try to protect the system in which a few people are very rich and a lot of people are very poor; so therefore could only be expected to behave like a modern French version of the Sheriff of Nottingham, as he has done, including torturing his own people for daring to protest against him by spraying them with poisoned gas for example.
Theresa May was also involved in international banking, and David Cameron worked for a PR (you know, think propaganda) firm.
That is, if we put despots, professional liars (think lawyers, most of them anyway) and professional propagandists into power, we can’t actually really then complain can we if they behave like despots, professional liars and propagandists?
So that in theory, as has been said “in a democracy, we get the government we deserve.”
And some may argue strongly against that, because it’s largely a stitch up. For all we are offered is bought candidates, and people like Tony Blair, who whatever they say, do something else completely once elected.
As they only make promises to get our vote, and then spend the rest of their term of office explaining why unfortunately their promises to make life better for all of us can’t for one reason or another ever be carried out.
“There’s no money left in the bank” claimed the Conservatives, after taking over from Labour, because Labour spent it all on “unaffordable public services.”
Public services like the NHS and benefits system, which now all of a sudden they are assuring us nearly unlimited funds can be thrown at, in the never ending (that’s the part that worries me, they are talking as if it might be) war against covid-19.
But in the UK at least, there was recently a choice for the first time in decades, of having Jeremy Corbyn as PM, who would have at least tried to tax the rich properly, though was not remotely the revolutionary that he was made out to be, and likewise Bernie Sanders in America looked like he was going to bring a lot more economic justice given the chance.
But the unelected powers that be found a way to neutralise both of them, though it was a pretty close call in the case of Jeremy Corybn in 2017, who got 40.2% of the national vote when Theresa May got only 42.6%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_Kingdom_general_election
So propped up by the Northern Irish DUP, which received only 0.9% of the national vote, Theresa May’s Conservative party ruled until Boris Johnson took over.
Whereas under full PR, Jeremy Corbyn could have easily ruled in coalition with any of several other parties, such as the Lib Dems or the SNP, and I think it is clear, the whole history of the UK and possibly the world too could have been very different than it is today.
As a dissident himself for most of his life, it is very unlikely that Jeremy Corbyn would have continued the clamp down on free speech.
Though personally I am not all that certain of that, as he was unfortunately in my view much too accommodating to the Blairites who still dominate the Labour party, and who effectively destroyed him, by forcing him into promising some kind of a second referendum on Brexit if elected, which of course alienated millions of possible Labour voters who were furious with the lack of Brexit to date under Theresa May.
And thus elected Boris Johnson almost entirely in the belief that he would carry it out, and was “a man of action” instead of the dithering Theresa May, or the too easily swayed by his own “internal enemies”, Jeremy Corbyn.
But it appears to date, the only decisive action that Boris Johnson has taken, is to lock his own people up, after promising them freedom from the EU.
Bear in mind it was two Conservative PMs who got the British people into the EU mess to begin with, with Ted Heath taking us in, and then John Major effectively imposing the Maastricht Treaty on everyone, which created the EU as we know it today (i.e. a political union instead of just an economic one) against the wishes of even his own party.
It is quite astounding to discover how John Major achieved that – he basically threatened his own party with mass job loss by calling a vote of confidence, which if lost would have resulted in a general election which might have seen Labour in power, and Conservative MPs mass losing their jobs.
So John Major effectively bullied even his own reluctant party into joining the EU as a political union via the Maastricht treaty, which then resulted in the more or less unlimited immigration to the UK from the EU, which probably led to the British Brexit vote, especially as the EU expanded quickly to 28 countries, and millions arrived from Eastern Europe when the government had predicted only thousands.
So I am concerned about the free speech issue as much as anybody else, but it appears without a change of government, and somehow finding a way to get people who truly represent us, and are not despots, there isn’t much we can do about it.
And of course it’s not only the government who denies our free speech, because as most of us know, and is of course the “raison d’etre” of this website, even supposedly independent media like the Guardian, regularly censor the public’s free speech, as do the also supposedly independent and publicly funded (but not publicly owned, you see) BBC.
In fact, not only do the BBC censor people’s comments in the limited space available, they also shut down their main debating forum several years back as “a cost cutting measure”, though while it existed it was also quite despotic in its restrictions on free speech.
I can think of a lot of other places the BBC might well have cut costs, like the salaries of many of its overpaid and under-talented presenters and unaccountable top executives.
But when you look at how this current site (the off-G) is still surviving with such meagre funding, it is not at all plausible that the BBC shut down their commenting website for any other reason than they did not prioritise very highly the public being free to debate.
They preferred only their own viewpoints to be heard, which clearly is still the case as regards this covid-19.
Peter Hitchens has for example pointed out that he has not been able to get any airing on the BBC to date for his views on covid-19, which equate to what most here apparently think, including me (though I would take issue with him on a number of other opinions he holds on other subjects), despite having made numerous previous appearances on very high profile BBC shows like Question Time and the Big Question and so on.
So the BBC has somehow decided it won’t allow any dissent to the covid-19 narrative, and one wonders *who exactly* in the BBC has ordered that and why.
To get free speech and free debate back, we need to ourselves treat this like a war, as in my view, the war on free speech is the most dangerous one of all, as that makes all those in power totally unaccountable and unopposable if they win that war and we lose, and protesting against the lack of democracy and accountability at the BBC might be a very good place to start.
Because after all, unlike the Guardian, *we all pay for it, we all fund it, even under threat of criminal punishment if we don’t*, so that suggests that we should have the right to at least elect its governing body, which to date is not only denied, but it is not even clear how this is done.
However, it appears the real power now lies with Ofcom, more or less a government body, who according to Wikipedia have the following brief:
“Ofcom has wide-ranging powers across the television, radio, telecoms and postal sectors. It has a statutory duty to represent the interests of citizens and consumers by promoting competition and protecting the public from harmful or offensive material.”
“Harmful or offensive material”? Like the truth? Like alternative points of view?
All these really non-democratic bodies who control what we can or cannot see and hear and communicate, are created and controlled by the government, as are the laws which enable them to make us criminals potentially, if we overstep whatever their interpretation is of the boundaries of free speech.
Only by finding a means to get true democracy, so we have a genuine means to remove politicians we do not approve of and do not represent us, and replace them with those who do, do we have any chance of changing things.
For example, under full PR, *any one of us* could become an MP and therefore potentially a Prime Minister even, if we could:
a) stump up a £500 deposit (you know, like the Monster Raving Loony Party candidates do annually, even though they always lose)
and
b) form a group (i.e. a party, even named the Monster Raving Loonies, if we like) of enough others nationally to get an *aggregate vote* of I calculate as little as 35,000, and we could quite likely get at least 1 MP in parliament.
So if we could get a candidate in all of the 650 constituencies in the UK, we could achieve that by getting an average of a mere 54 votes, and for example “Lord Buckethead” who stood for the Monster Raving Loony Party in the last election against even Boris Johnson got 125 votes, so that is definitely achievable.
Then instead of being only able to do upvotes or downvotes on a comments site, anyone of us could actually give the thumbs up or down in determining what laws get made or abolished, or whether even we go to war or not (in the case of the Iraq war for example), and may even decide such a massive issue by our single vote, as many issues are very close.
For example, there was a vote in the early years of American history to decide whether the official national language of America should be English or German which was very narrowly decided (I think possibly by even one vote) to be English, and one might speculate that the Second World War might have gone rather differently, had they decided upon German.
In describing Corbyn’s lynching, why do you omit the villainous, entirely mendacious and hate-crazed campaign of false accusations of ‘antisemitism’? As for Boynie Sanders, his treachery and duplicity were illustrated even more plainly this time than in 2016. He could hardly wait to roll over and surrender to Biden and the DNC vote-riggers.
“In describing Corbyn’s lynching, why do you omit the villainous, entirely mendacious and hate-crazed campaign of false accusations of ‘antisemitism’? ”
I don’t “omit” it, I just didn’t think that detailed explanation of the way Jeremy Corbyn was removed was relevant to the point I was trying to make, which was mainly to try to get our free speech and justice back by getting real democracy somehow.
As Jeremy Corbyn is alas no longer in the picture, I don’t think a detailed postmortem is going to do much good at this particular point in time.
Likewise, I don’t think having a go at the people who brought him down is going to do much good, but rather to simply reform even the Labour party democracy such that all candidates are deselected before each election, and the local party members should be allowed to choose who they want to stand for the next election, instead of that being decided by non-democratic pressure groups, whoever they may be.
But the public still had a mind of its own, so could have rejected the propaganda if it wished.
I very much doubt the in my view false charges of antisemitism played much part in Corbyn losing the last election. I think it was simply because he allowed himself to be manipulated into supporting a 2nd referendum, so the majority who voted for Brexit believed he was going to allow the Remain side to keep us in Europe, so I think the fact he lost badly was almost all about that, and almost nothing to do with the antisemitism accusations, which the media and the Blairites in his own party were obsessed with, but the public weren’t.
Well, I think you were mistaken. Corbyn’s vilification means that, throughout the West, the Jewish elites have established a de facto veto over any political leader that they do not like, for their pro-Palestinian positions, or, as Rabbi Sacks stated, their ‘Leftwing policies’. So ‘democracy’ a sham as it is, is now replaced by Judeocracy, if you like.
I agree with much of what you have written here @1of7billion, but I do think the false charges of antisemitism (which were relentless) played more of a part than you suggest.
For example, Corbyn’s modestly socialistic policy proposals were rubbished of course by the neoliberal meda as beeing “loony left” or whatever, but people might have been prepared to ignore the media and examine them more coolly if they had not been put off by the dishonest smears.
We should also of course take into account the revelations in the leaked Labour Party report, which confirm what many of us thought, which was that large parts of the Labour Party establishment were conspiring against their democratically elected leader.
I won’t give a link, but if anyone is interested, the latest video on the YT channel “Red Star Radio” is very interesting on what the leaked revelations show. His videos are a bit of an acquired taste, but that one was quite good, I thought.
Love the quote in the article “Certain states routinely use disinformation as a policy tool”.
Muck from the BBC & the ABC about ‘systemic antisemitism in the UK Labour Party’ a classic example?
‘The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.’. Tacitus.
1of7B – I’ve enjoyed your posts to date, but this one is outstanding.
So many insightful and powerful points made, and a refreshing and interesting proposal for improvement too – pondering that, if minds like those of the site’s founders, administrators, contributing authors, and (the overwhelming majority of) commenters were to be those forming a Proportionally Representative democratic system of governance, wouldn’t we have a fairer, more compassionate and healthy (less rottenly corrupt) political landscape and life experience?
As others have commented on recent articles – what a lifesaver OFF-G is for those of us who don’t fall in with the mandated narrative, and who revere free speech!
Financial contribution forthcoming.
Notice how the illness, if it exists at all, is slowly being defined with the correct characteristics to serve the drug companies and the surveillance state best.
Don’t ask what is know about this virus, just ask what will be the characteristics of this virus that will suit pharmaceutical companies and the surveillance state best.
Time limited immunity, with repeated recurrence with no cure is the most profitable for big pharma and for the surveillance state.
Recurring outbreaks requiring detainment confinement and continual surveillance of the ‘contaminated’, is what suits them best. Just swap out the ‘Civid victims’ for ‘political opposition’ and you have a police state.