Coronavirus
- Thread starter brb
- Start date
-
Please bear with us on the new site integration and fixing any known bugs over the coming days. If you can not log in please try resetting your password and check your spam box. If you have tried these steps and are still struggling email [email protected] with your username/registered email address
-
- Status
for you, I posted a nice tune pal.
imagine being for the profit and the people.....and anti vaxx. Same wheel, all for the cash.
I wouldn’t say any better mate but certainly no worse at this point, so managing ok. Cheers mate.
Hope it eases up for you all soon.
Like how covid has made you subtle on your new thread BTW
Hope it eases up for you all soon.
Like how covid has made you subtle on your new thread BTW
Lol. thanks bro.
Taken my new thread quite badly. It was made with good, long term intentions.
You must log in or register to see images
Antivaxers are in danger of becoming a cult
Protests surrounding the pandemic are borrowing from American conspiracies and threatening to turn violent
David Aaronovitch
Wednesday July 28 2021, 5.00pm, The Times
Share
Save
She seemed to me intoxicated, the woman framed by the National Gallery and a giant TV screen, parading up and down with a microphone in her hand. Intoxicated not with alcohol but with the event for which she was acting as master of ceremonies. She loved the crowd gathered for the “Freedom Rally” in Trafalgar Square last weekend, and they were loving her right back.
Which may explain why she got carried away. In between speakers she condemned those who had been dispensing Covid vaccines. “Get their names!” she yelled. “Email them to me! With a group of lawyers, we are collecting all that.” Then she added: “At the Nuremberg Trials, the doctors and nurses stood trial and they hung. If you are a doctor or a nurse, now is the time to get off that bus… and stand with us the people.”
Us the people, as measured by any poll I’ve ever seen, are very unlikely to see the staff of vaccination centres as heirs to mass-murdering Nazi doctors. And ex-nurse Kate Shemirani’s invocation has earned her notoriety and, apparently, an investigation by the Met.
But it went down well with her several thousand homies in the square. Which was disconcerting to anyone watching pictures of the crowd, because, with a few exceptions, they looked normal. Not as though they’d just escaped from the middle of an End is Nigh sandwich board. But like you, dear reader.
I was struck by the serendipity of this all taking place as the congressional inquiry opened into the storming of the US Capitol on January 6. Because it seemed to me that the same strange combination of conspiracy theorism, New Age egoism, far-right activism and insurgent mentality characterised both events, except one had developed more quickly and more violently than the other. And if this seems pessimistic, I will explain.
Just over ten years ago, at the end of the pre-social media age, I wrote a book on the history and psychology of conspiracy theories. Back then I analysed them as having distinct strands of narrative, which rarely came together. There were the theories that attached themselves to very specific catastrophes, such as the death of Diana or the attack on the Twin Towers. Usually these would not require an overarching mega-theory. Then there were the (I thought) far crazier theories about malign actors seeking world domination and active in almost everything. These would encompass notions about the Illuminati, the New World Order, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Bilderbergers and the Trilateral Commission. Most of those would involve the Rothschilds and at the very least would suggest a degree of Jewish involvement.
I majored on these categories and largely ignored the third, which are centred on paranoid fantasies about how the authorities want to poison or control us. Most of these fantasies seemed to be highly individual and unorganised. Misguided and anti-scientific neuroses about microwaves, fluoride in the water, chemtrails and phone towers came and went. The big exception was the Andrew Wakefield fraud over the MMR vaccination. And then finally, there is one I didn’t recognise as a category at all: “they” are coming for our kids.
What is new about the anti-vax, anti-lockdown, “freedom” movement as it was on display last weekend in London is that it is a portmanteau, an almanac, of all these movements and ideas. As far as I could tell, the people there and many of those expressing online support were signed up to an assortment of these notions — almost a new ideology of how things happen.
The cast of speakers introduced by Shemirani gives an idea of the field. There were a couple of ex-Ukip candidates and the increasingly desperate Katie Hopkins. For medical expertise they produced Dr Vernon Coleman, an elderly ex-GP who used to write tabloid articles in the 1980s about how Aids was a hoax and now argues that Covid is a hoax. He turned out to be the childhood GP of another speaker, Gareth Icke, the son of the antisemitic cultist David Icke (and therefore the grandson of the Godhead). Icke provided the finale after Piers Corbyn (brother of the other Godhead) had done his turn.
But what intrigued me was the presence on stage of a Jaclyn Dunne. Dunne was introduced as a “holistic health practitioner”. Apparently she has a diploma in hypnotherapy and runs a company called Mind Body Detox in Essex. Her involvement chimed with many of the placards at the rally. “Truth, Health, Freedom”; “Hands off our children”; “My Body, My Choice”; “When Tyranny Becomes Law, Resistance Becomes Duty” and “Hoax”. The combination here mirrors the QAnon mega conspiracy theory in the US that animated many of those who stormed the Capitol and is even supported by at least one Republican member of Congress. And I am worried that it has the same capacity to cause mayhem and violence.
On its fringes spring up people, as seen at some lockdown protests, who are members of the new far right. These are not the old fascists who believed in a strong, national state, but an anarchist breed who advocate vigilante violence against opponents. And further on the fringes are the lone wolves, the kind of people who tire of waiting for Nuremberg.
We can all argue about what causes people to endorse dangerous conspiracy theories and to become conduits for damaging disinformation. It’s a lucrative business, I dare say, for someone like Gareth Icke, who is unlikely to share his bestselling father’s psychopathology. Others may be seeking to rationalise the experience and losses of the last 18 months and deserve our sympathy. Yet others are the kind of people who are always seeking causes and looking for fights, often motivated by an aggressive sense of wounded entitlement. Then there are those who, though seeming ordinary, have attained a higher state of consciousness — like the woman who carried a placard that read “We’re the Lions in a World of Sheep”.
The most serious threats from this new movement are widespread disinformation (mostly pseudoscience) and violence. A determined culture of countering disinformation — as embraced by the BBC and by this newspaper in employing specialist data journalists — is more useful even than social media takedowns. It just needs to be spread.
The violence I don’t have an easy answer for. Certainly we should be intolerant of language that incites hatred and we have to hope the police and security services have their eye on this new ball. A sentiment that may earn me my own place in a speech or two at the next Freedom Rally.
^^^^^^^^^^ Born a Jew though. Just saying it for you Aber, so you don't have to pretend you've read it. 
See in Indonesia they give you a free meal and goodie bag when you get vaccinated. Works much better than forcing them - no indonesian ever passes up the chance of a free meal.The mad fkrs running tings init
Fk the system
You must log in or register to see media
Australia has gone mad and the population is starting to get fed up with it. I think its partly due to the poor vaccine uptake due to reluctance and supply issues and a government panicking about the delta variant.
But surely what the varying responses by different governments show is that this isnt some global conspiracy.
Will be interesting to see which country comes out of this best in terms of economic and human cost.
I think we already know who will come out of this in better shape......china
I guess when you have 1.4billion people you can prioritise the economics over the human aspect.
There are plenty of private companies making big money out of this as well. I am on day 3 of a 10-day stretch in a State Prison (sorry government quarantine hotel) at Heathrow which is being run by G4S. Suspect there is more security staff than quarantiners here.
G4S some shady figures involved in that in that company......big fat fingers in pies and they will do anything to keep it that way.....yes sir no sir how high do you want me to jump types.
They trying it alls ways dude....free weed free entry into lottery fking doughnuts even
My request is a lifetime supply of military grade cannabis.
- Status