by John Ward
Everyone in my own contrarian internet community these days is using oddities, abnormalities, statistics, percentages, contradictions and demonstrations of bad science or virological nonsense to point out what’s really going on behind the news.
But the vast majority of people are not consuming the news behind the news and deciding whether this or that person is the truth for whom the news wouldn’t be the news without the news. They lack certain things that might allow them to do that – like time, interest, intelligence, time, energy, vision, insight, and also, time.
So instead, they stick with the asserted and easily digestible diet on offer. This food-for-no-thought is first of all masticated by a bunch of parrots, and then rammed down their beaks in a series of globally coordinated clichés. The idea is that only that kind of gloop is going to be easily assimilated and turned into hate, fear and belief.
As ordinary people don’t fly around the world or engage in heavy petting with search engines, they can’t see that the same words, promises and bollocks are being put out wherever people live on whatever news channel or website to which they subscribe.
I thought today I might try and broaden awareness of just how choreographed, silly and eventually funny this Earthling Mediaspeak is.
For example, no politicians anywhere are on the ball unless they’re following the science. Sadly, this is the science of Neil Ferguson, Chris Whitty and Peter Horby…..but it is the only one on offer in Boris Johnson’s knitting circle.
And so predictably, the No Alternative mantra always starts with ‘Only’.
Only by destroying the economy can we build back better, because let’s face it, there is no basis at all for condemning trickle-down wealth as simply a myth.
Only by showing how Trump’s lawsuits are all frivolous can the White Hats around Joe Biden move on to the Great Reset that will let all of us share equally in whatever benefits that reset might bring, like maybe Cyborg humans, defunded police and free school lunches for the children of BLM protesters.
Only by criminalising fake anti-vaccine news can we ensure that Russian disinformation is socially distanced from our citizens who, as we know, are Untermenschen and thus incapable of resisting this Putinous virus of propaganda ravaging the World.
Only by demonstrating that 200% of all Covid19 cases turn into horrible lingering deaths can we get the populous to grasp that it is the greatest threat to human survival since Adolf Hitler.
And last but not least – while only lockdown, social distancing and the wearing of masks can stop this evil China-generated bioweapon from raging onto a Second Wave of devastatingly fewer deaths – in time, only forced vaccination alongside demonisation of those who refuse it as serial killers will wipe it out once and for all every six months….with total immunity from litigation for those who know what they’re doing – even if the vaccine turns us all into potted shrimps.
Forgive me here, but this logic strikes me as uncannily similar to the original Friedmanite neoliberal argument – whose assertion was that only by 0.1% of our species becoming billionaire gargoyles could the rest of us benefit in any way whatsoever.
I don’t have a solution to this dilemma (yet) but I do know what the task for all of us on the less-than-level playing field is: to emerge from our blogosphere shell, venturing forth onto dry land and into a broader set of influencers and opinion formers who have access to the centres of media and economic power.
Very few of us are, as yet, mass media. This is currently a weakness – but we can turn it into a strength if we engage with that powerful minority who have doubts about Klaus Schwab and all his works.