Posters of terror - updated 3/12

This poster sums up all that is reprehensible about the government’s conduct this year. Just look at it. Scaremongering bleeds out of its every pore. 

Look at the image: a nurse tends a sick man, her dressed for Chernobyl, him prostate and masked (and non-white of course, as per most of these public information ads).

COVID-19 KILLS it screams (I'm surprised they didn't use red). Well, yes, apart from the 99.7% who survive it. And, funnily enough, cancer kills too, but HM government has chosen to put on the back burner this year. Macmillan Cancer Support estimates that 50,000 people across Britain now have cancers still undiagnosed because of Covid-related disruptions and delays to NHS check-ups, screenings and referrals during the March-to-July lockdown alone. Think how bad that is now. An additional 33,000 existing cancer patients are still waiting on potentially life-saving treatments delayed due to the bug-eyed focus on a virus whose victims will typically have months rather than decades of life ahead of them.  

‘All ages can catch it.’ Again, grotesque scaremongering. That’s like saying ‘you can die at any age’, which is obviously true, but your CHANCES of doing so vary enormously depending on your age. For Covid, a child has a 1 in 55,000 chance of dying IF they get it. Still sound too much for you? Well, that child is 25 times more likely to die from other causes. ‘Catching it’ is not a death sentence. An obese 75-year-old who gets it has a 96% chance of survival, and that's rising all the time as treatments get better. 

As Michael Levitt, the Nobel-winning professor of biophysics, wrote: “Reporting cases without an age range [is] meaningless; still a great way to keep terrorizing us.” 

This graph shows Spanish deaths, but it is reflected worldwide. Look how the curve only steepens meaningfully when we get to around 65 years of age.

‘Anyone can spread it.’ Again, this is like saying anyone can have a meteor hit them. As even the WHO has admitted, asymptomatic spreading is extremely rare. How much more mature would the government have been, how much more refreshing would it have been, that instead of this rubbish we’d got simple common sense messages like: If you feel ill, stay at home. Shelter the vulnerable. Stay away from large indoor events to limit the chances of you getting the virus. But no, all we get is this disgraceful hollering that causes unfathomable damage to our society (what do you expect when we have a leader who currently cowers in Downing Street alone, a pitiful excuse for a man, hamstrung by his own absurd rules. Did this guy actually write a biography of Churchill? Was it ghosted?).

'We must drive the case numbers down.' Stop doing so much useless testing then. Crummy PCR tests often show that you're positive when you're negative and drive the government's fear narrative ever onwards: there are stories of the guy who tested himself 15 times and got nine positives and six negatives, and of the family who didn't actually get tested and got told all four of them were positive. Elsewhere, Elon Musk tested positive and negative on the same day! Most of the 'cases' that are genuinely positive record mild or moderate symptoms, or none at all - what a terrifying disease, that you have to test for to see if you have it. The lives that are continually being ruined by people being told to isolate for 14 days after a positive test are testament to the hideous failure of the government's response to this virus. But it gives them another chance to do what they do best: spread anxiety and fear.

This is why my office is nearly empty; this is why I see children in masks; this is why elderly people are too afraid to leave their houses. This abhorrent government has turned a crisis into an existential catastrophe. 

Terrifyingly, people have faith in this monster (for reasons I go into in this post). Well, I’m reminded of the exchange on an episode of the Alan Partridge radio series where Alan says to his guest, who is a criminal rights lawyer: “With respect, the police aren’t going to arrest anyone who hasn’t committed a crime, are they?” To which his guest replies: “...with slightly less respect, have you ever heard of wrongful arrest?”

Absurd posters like these neatly sum up this administration's reign of terror, and in museums of the future they will be exhibits in the depiction of its foul deeds. (By the way, what’s the EU’s flag still doing on there?)

To finish, here’s the great Jordan Peterson in a lecture from 2017. I’ve bolded up sentences that I thought were of particular interest…

The dictator wants to impose strict uniformity on the entire population. That’s order. One of the things we’ve discovered that’s really interesting is that disgust sensitivity is associated with orderliness and that’s associated with conscientious, and one of the things about Hitler was that he was very disgust sensitive and a lot of his hatred for non Aryans - so imagine inside the Aryan box it was all uniform, outside it was all parasites and predators - was a manifestation of disgust, not of fear. It’s a whole different thing and if you read Hitler’s Table Talk, which is a collection of his spontaneous dinner speeches from 1939 to 1942, you see that his metaphor for the Aryan race was body, a pure body, unassaulted by parasites or predators, and that he was trying to erect a border around it to keep all of that away. 

So it’s an immunological disgust-like metaphor and there was a brilliant study published about three years ago, showing that if you went around and sampled political attitudes in different countries or even within the same country, what you found was that the higher the prevalence of infectious diseases the higher the probability of totalitarian political attitudes at the local level, and you can imagine what happens if there’s infectious diseases: you want to put borders around everything, you don’t want movement between ideas or people, because that’s partly how the disease spreads, you’re going to have much more strict sexual rules, for example, because that’s a great way for diseases to be transmitted. 

Before Hitler went on his rampage against the non Aryans he cleaned up all the factories. He went in there and fumigated them, it was part of the law, and he went on a public health campaign to get rid of tuberculosis and he got rid of the bugs in the factories as well, and he used Zyklon B, that’s an insecticide and that’s the gas that he used in the gas chambers eventually, so first it was the bugs and the rats and then it was euthanasia, forced euthanasia and the rationale for that was compassion, by the way.  

UPDATE 3/12

Government plumbs new depths of horrible emotional blackmail.