Random thoughts 5

A selection of the comments I post on newspaper websites... (Most recent first) These ones are all lockdown-related.

Upsides of lockdown:

1 POSSIBLY slowed the virus spread SLIGHTLY for a short time

Downsides of lockdown:

1 Added to the mountain of national debt – each month we now spend more on servicing the debt than on defence

2 Caused immense psychological damage to millions – even now you see the odd person walking round outside in a mask

3 Had a terrible effect on other health conditions such as cancer – and in terms of YEARS lost of life, is vastly more than covid. In general public health suffered because people exercised less, drank more, worried more and felt lonelier

4 Damaged the socialisation and education of children – with effects possibly lasting a lifetime

5 The furlough scheme turbo-charged Brits’ belief in getting something for nothing, ie the government will pay you to do nothing – this will continue to have a devastating effect on productivity

6 Trust in public health bodies has evaporated for the millions who have seen with their own eyes that lockdowns, masks and the ‘vaccines’ did little good (and indeed did harm)

7 Has set a new standard for public health response with lockdowns, despite all the damage they cause as listed here, being the go-to response going forward for disease outbreaks

8 The lockdowns went hand in hand with mass censorship online (and on broadcast media) of dissenting voices, stifling public discourse

9 Friends and family were set at each other’s throats due to differing opinions of the draconian restrictions

10 It gave every jobsworth and wannabe bully (at all levels of society) licence to live out their inner dictator fantasies

I’m sure there are many more but ten will do for now; and of course all the ten listed above have many subsets of terribleness and despair.

Those idiots standing around outside with placards like 'Boris Johnson killed my dad' boil my blood. Blaming a political leader for the spread of a respiratory virus, eh? Hmmm. Sensible. Possible political agenda at work here?

Did people blame Harold Macmillan for deaths from the Asian Flu in 1958, or Harold Wilson for deaths from Hong Kong Flu in 1969? Of course not. It'd be absurd. But then we do now live in the Age of Absurd.

Inquiry is a sick joke.

Hugo Keith is the kind of oily, aloof, bitter, nasty metropolitan liberal with ZERO understanding of how people in small houses or with few friends or family or who do menial jobs or who have mental health problems suffered massively thanks to the evil madness of lockdown.

He is to 2023 what Ferguson, Whitty, Vallance, Cummings, Gove and Hancock were to 2020. Utterly detestable, cruel, detached people - pure sociopaths.

For a man not apparently convinced by the lockdown lobby Johnson did an amazing impression of someone who fully believed in the nonsense he came out with in public, and the appalling – and risible – restrictions he pushed through, usually without democratic process.

He said things like a cricket ball was a vector of disease. What an inane statement, devised to generate fear and confusion.

Children in 'bubbles', police told to arrest hill walkers, neighbours told to inform on one another, long, gappy queues to get in supermarkets, fines of tens of thousands of pounds for young people (under no threat) having parties... The list goes on.

He certainly did his best impression of the sort of quasi-fascist that Cummings undoubtedly is.

2023 is like a nightmare I might have had in 1988 when imagining how bad life might become in this country in the future. Every single day you’re hit with things that are so crazy and depressing it’s unreal.

The whole thing was the most disastrous failure by the public health lot imaginable. They barely got a single thing right in two years.

Face masks? Ineffective and dehumanising. Track and trace? For an airborne, highly contagious virus – don't make me laugh. Young healthy people not allowed to do anything? Appalling. Telling people to stay inside rather than go outside and get fresh air, exercise and vitamin D? Shocking. Telling people to stay inside and get fat, lazy, scared, fall down the stairs etc? Reprehensible. Shut down gyms, tennis courts, football pitches, golf courses etc, where people could get physical and mental stimulation? Terrible. An under-tested 'vaccine' given to the whole population, rather than a slim cohort of the very old and very ill? Obscene.

I could go on. But the response truly was a catastrophe on every single level.

Never mind the shutting down of society almost completely for big chunks of the two years: remember the rule of six? The curfews? The children’s playgrounds taped off? The aisles in some shops you couldn’t access? The two-metre rule? The ten-day self-isolation’ period? The mask when standing up at the pub, but not when sitting down? (Which was the exact opposite to the House of Commons.)  

The encouragement to inform on neighbours? The fines of many thousands of pounds for meeting friends? The wave of terror unleashed by the public health messaging?

It was evil and it was stupid and it was sociopath-driven iron-fist rule in action. At the core of the evil was the lie that the asymptomatic were big drivers of the pandemic. Without that lie, the whole thing collapses.

The god complex of these public health officials and many politicians knows no bounds. They thought they could stop a new strain of coronavirus from spreading, and from harming people? Are they mad? Since when did it become an idea that we can battle invisible nature and win like that? 

And the resulting pandemic, if you want to call it that (it wasn’t ‘pan’, ie it didn’t really seriously affect ‘all’ – unlike the hideous counter-measures) was not a huge medical event. No hospitals were overwhelmed, anywhere. There was a small bump in excess mortality in 2020; actually a smaller one than in any year prior to 2009. The UK did not perform noticeably worse than elsewhere.

But in true 1984 fashion, the likes of Whitty and Vallance are rewriting history, lying through their teeth.

Whoever thought it could possibly be a good idea to hold nightly televised press conferences where they literally read out the number of people who had died of covid (with no distinction made between ‘of’ and ‘with’) – without saying how many other people had died of other things, with the impression given that anyone could die from covid, not just mainly very old and very ill people - must have either been deeply evil or very stupid, or both.

What did these maniacs think that this and all their other fear messaging was going to do to millions other than making them terrified, giving them mental conditions for years and forcing them to stay indoors where they were MORE likely to pick up infections, get fat, get lazy, get depressed, constantly search out scary stuff on the internet? 

We were prepared. There was a pandemic management plan in place but it was jettisoned in March 2020. People like Whitty and Vallance, even in that month, stuck to the plan initially. And then what happened?

Did they both, particularly alleged Corbynista Vallance, see lockdown as a) a chance to exercise medical socialism on a wide scale b) the opportunity to wreck the economy so the Tories would later lose power c) revenge for Brexit d) the chance to make LOADS of money and make their mates in pharma a load of money?

Which? None of the above? All of the above? Who can say...

Impact of covid? Impact of the deranged measures taken to 'fight' it, more like.

Like denying people the perfectly good treatments for it that already existed it; sticking people on ventilators that harmed them further; asking people to stay indoors, where viruses spread, you can get horribly lonely and you can have any number of other mishaps, rather than go outside where viruses don't spread and you get vitamin D that helps you fight infections; building up pent up demand for the NHS that would later be unleashed like a tidal wave; telling people to stay away from their job and friends even if they were feeling perfectly well but because they'd had a 'positive' from a dystopian covid 'test'; and a million other terrible things.

'I still think it is reasonable to have gone for the first lockdown as the best way of trying to get a grip on the situation'

Wrong. This was what everything else was built on – all the horrors that came afterwards were created by the initial lockdown. 'We did it before – why not again?'

If they'd looked hard enough there was plenty of data on the virus, such as the Diamond Princess cruise ship. But no, they were spooked by obviously fake scare videos from CCP stooges and by the modelling of many times discredited 'scientist' Neil Ferguson. 

We didn't diagnose covid, it diagnosed us, it diagnosed our political and media classes – and found them hopelessly incompetent and corrupt.

As Brownstone’s Jeffrey Tucker says:

Lockdowns utterly shattered the protocols of public health, settled law and freedom itself all over the world. They wrecked myriad institutions, wrought an incredible economic and cultural crisis, demoralised the whole population and built up a leviathan of command and control that is not only not backing down but growing ever more.

We’ve never seen anything like it in our lives. Speaking personally, this reality utterly shattered a worldview that I didn’t know I held: namely, I genuinely believed humanity was on a path, even an inevitable one, toward greater knowledge, learning and the embrace of freedom. After March 2020, I and everyone discovered otherwise. That was both intellectually and psychologically traumatic for me and for millions of others. 

https://dailysceptic.org/2023/11/02/anti-lockdown-goes-mainstream/

Remember the arbitrary ‘self-isolation’ rules? Remember how scary they were, how horrible it felt, how a ‘be exceptionally cruel to be kind’ ethos infused our way of life. Okay, unlike the Philippines, our government didn’t make it illegal for children to leave their house for a year, but what they did was still deeply appalling. I for one will never get over it and it changed the shape of my brain: I will never view life in the same way again. The tyranny we saw was beyond appalling.

The reaction to covid neatly encapsulated how the rulers have lost their way, how civilisation has imploded in the 21st century.

Making people think that if they didn’t have symptoms – or if they did, and they were mild – was a terrible thing, was one of the most heinous tricks ever played on the British public by its government.

Mass censorship, criminalising ordinary behaviour, encouraging snooping, creating an extreme climate of fear, coercing people into taking medical treatments they didn’t need, suspending democracy etc.

That flinty libertarian Boris Johnson, who for seven months of his premiership didn’t allow people to leave their house without a ‘reasonable excuse’. Yes, that libertarian, that conservative. Whose early act as London Mayor was to ban alcohol on the Tube.

Whom gods destroy they first make mad. Well, we have certainly gone mad in recent years.

And don't expect Parliament to do anything about it. Last week virtually none of them turned up for Andrew Bridgen's excess deaths debate. If they think he is wrong, why not go in there and debate him and make him look foolish? Their absence only suggests that Bridgen is in fact right and they are cowards and liars.

Do not trust our elected representatives. 

Once upon a time I could not envisage how Nazi Germany started. It just seemed impossible how one of the world’s most sophisticated countries was turned into a murderous dictatorship.

Now, I have no problem envisaging how it started. Firstly because of the covid reaction, in which Boris Johnson turned the country into a police state, suspended parliamentary democracy, spread fear, encouraged people to inform on their neighbour, and so on.

Secondly because of the massive antisemitism I’ve seen on the streets in the last couple of weeks. The Jews really are hated, really are the scapegoats. Obviously the Muslims hate them, but the far Left seems to have taken over from the far Right in detesting them too.

So it is now all too obvious to me how Nazi Germany began – and how obvious it is that we’re rapidly heading in the same direction.