Final thoughts on 2021 + INDEX
Another awful year is about to end. In many ways this one has actually been worse than 2020, as global governments have turned the authoritarian screws tighter than ever before, making misery for millions for marginal gains on the viral front. The world is now run by doctors, cowards and villains. We have seen the fetishisation, politicisation and pathologization of one single virus. How on earth will people 100 years' hence - providing we still have free speech and functioning democracies, which is by no means guaranteed - view all this lunacy?
Over the next few years, as more of the terrible effects of lockdowns and other measures become evident, along with scandalous exposes about the implementation of the measures, trust in government, science and the media will plummet even lower than now. This corrosive cynicism will eat away at the heart of society itself.
But then again, perhaps it won't. Because most people don't really seem to care about what's gone on. So many have franchised their thinking out to government and the BBC. I witnessed this with my family this Christmas: none of them are stupid, but virtually none of them take any time whatsoever to do more than scratch the surface of Covid/lockdown information out there. Some seem not to have attention spans that extend further than an Instagram post or a Tweet. How can they ever be expected to read, say, a long article questioning the efficacy of masks? They just pop their mask on, don't give it a thought and - boosh! - there we go, they're helping shape the new abnormal.
The response to "Where's your mask?" should be "Where's your brain?", but what's the point? We live among the foolish and the craven, and probably always have done. It's just that they're more visible nowadays. People chat about "the first lockdown" or "the second lockdown" like they would their first or second holidays to Lanzarote, as opposed to stopping to acknowledge that lockdowns are the biggest policy disasters ever seen in the civilised world. Everyday conversations with people make me feel like an outlier, an extremist.
While writing this I received my fifth text message from the NHS telling me to get a booster. Each time I'm told to get it, the less likely I am to obey. The newspapers are full of one-page adverts for the third jab, costing millions, paid for by us, an unnecessary medical procedure for healthy people, with a smiling, nearly always ethnic 'minority' person, to convince us to do so. High streets are masked hellscapes; only pubs provide solace.
There is little chance of this public health socialist state easing. While England has recently not gone as full-on totalitarian as the morons and maniacs in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Johnson should still never be forgiven for what he has done. The UK remains an influential country and what his government did was copied by scores of others, with catastrophic results.
We might have said of the omicron variant in years gone by that "there's a nasty bug going round". But can we even say that? Is it even a "nasty" bug? Does it not just give cold-like symptoms to most people? And yet it's shut down swathes of our culture and society once more. The craziness of mass testing and isolation continue to wreck our way of life and cripple our public finances. We have gone mad as a world, literally mad. So mad that perhaps only ideas previously thought of as conspiracy theories explain the madness? Does the fact that the world is still drowning in restrictions not tell us that this has been the most ineffectual mass roll-out of vaccines ever?
As the year ends, I have little hope that things will get better soon. Yes, things will get a bit better in the spring - but next autumn the dread and the threats will be dialled up, our freedoms will be dismantled again, and we'll be stuck in this loop of doom for many decades. International travel will continue to be an off-putting melange of masks and tests and certificates and other rules that will make as much sense as the current ones forbidding taking a normal-sized toothpaste tube in your hand luggage. Real-world evidence no longer informs policymaking; all that matters is the original objective, as has been demonstrated by the introduction of vaxx passes.
When I wrote what I thought would be my final blog post exactly one year ago, I had no idea that 365 days later I would still be doing this and be even more gloomy. Hence my optimism and hope for 2022 is pretty much non-existent.
Here is a list of my 2021 blog posts, all clickable:
The cruelty of this government is beyond belief
The 19 most scandalous things the government has done during this tragic debacle
How postmodernism paved the way for lockdowns
The Covid-19 alternate UK timeline
Protest march, London, December 18
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