Covid is NOT a plague by any stretch of imagination. Even if some hundred average healthy individuals die, it cannot be categorised as plague. In the context of 7b, it’s not even a ripple of a plague. That’s why there was no need for border control as initially the government was thinking sensibly. Then they fell to pressure and group think. Then it got worse with masks and hand washing.
Historically germs have taken some toll on life but somehow Covid was earmarked as remarkable & worthy of panic. It was just a bit different, not remarkable. Even if it would have taken more people than it purportedly has. Germs are more our friends than enemies. The war on Covid has encouraged us to to remove our friendlies by constant hand cleaning and masking. That is where the long term danger lies. This conditioning will surely have far worse consequences on population and its mindset than Covid.
However we are in a better place than many other nations. I agree.
‘But one very obvious lesson of history is that we are fortunate, even during a plague, to live in Europe in the early twenty-first century‘
In my mind the mistake was to play this drama to the media/mob’s satisfaction. In accepting mistakes( if this lab grown)and some related deaths, we can learn, grow and move forward. In clouding our thinking with denials, panic and judgemental reporting, there is no hope for learning lessons, truth and proportion.
I am increasingly of the view that the media is a malignant influence on politics. On every issue about which I have a reasonable level of knowledge or which I bother to research properly, the media narrative is invariably wildly inaccurate and hinders sensible debate and policy-making.
For a few weeks in Jan and Feb 2020 Boris and Dom Cummings were on to something. Stop playing the journalists “narrative” games by refusing to put ministers up for interviews which they knew would be aggressive and bypass the media outlets with online “People’s PMQs”. They understood a) Lots of high profile journalists wanted revenge for Brexit and would never give them a fair hearing, and b) all outlets are more interested in creating drama than reporting news. Getting involved with that circus was counterproductive. Unfortunately Covid came along and sunk this plan.
It doesn’t say much for the quality of our MPs and that is the real problem not the media. Plus of course the electorate is easily influence by all forms of the media.
The West as the world knew it is in a War for its very existence. The enemy of the amazingly enlightened, free, intellectual, productive, West are:
MSM, Social Media, The Education industry, the Entertainment industry, the Global Elites, all the Political parties on the Left, all the petty elected hard left bureaucrats, the Marxist CRT< BLM and their ilk, (even centrist left like UK Conservatives) – and they are winning.
I never could discover the point of the article above, or what is was going on about, but it misses Entirely what the deal is:
This is not a plague, but a new thing, a ‘Plandemic’. Covid its self gave zero reason to lockdown, well. maybe 6 weeks to flatten the sombrero to make folk happier, but this was entirely a LOCKDOWN disaster, not a viral one.
The Puppet Biden just had his minions vote in 3.5$ Trillion, on top of 1.5$ Trillion (basically the normal entire year’s budget for USA, and that including huge deficit spending as usual) of insane spending which is pretty much all destructive to freedom, to poor people, middle class people, everyone but the extremely wealthy – it loads them up with swag beyond their greediest dreams of avarice. For the rest it devalues the Dollar, and by the stealth tax of inflation eats everyone’s savings.
Biden is out to destroy the West, much like the Bolsheviks did to Imperial Russia to usher in the age of terror and misery we called the USSR.
COVID was their Tool to do this! The locking up of the production, paying the now unproductive to sit at home consuming Chinese goods rather than making their own stuff – and paying every kind of insanity, keeping interest zero, ruining the national debt to 123% GDP, to 30 Trillion wile destroying the bond market and inflating equities to stratosphere levels – destroying the education, the pensions, the companies, allowing open borders to let illegals take all the jobs from the unskilled
This covid response has nothing to do with health – it is to destroy the West so it can become Communist/Lite, and Nu-Feudalism can become the New World Order (You will own nothing, you will be vaccinated and tattooed to prove it (every 6 months a booster) and you will get UBI of poverty, and you will like it. Or else, as C Schwab said)
andrew harman
2 years ago
Nobody except the most deranged doomsday eschatological cultists ever saw this as civilisation threatening anyway.
I know-it was like if the Titanic was sailing mid Atlantic and someone thought they saw an iceberg so they put the old and inferm into the lifeboats, scuttled the ship, and let everyone drown – just to be on the safe side.
Mark Goodhand
2 years ago
Why did it take the best part of a year for masking and good ventilation, rather than mostly pointless hand-washing and surface cleaning, to be strongly prioritised in advice to the public and to hospitals, schools and shops?
The answer to these questions, perhaps, is that closing the borders and emphasising the importance of fresh, clean air sounded too simple to be true.
Sorry, but that’s obvious nonsense.
How can “hand-washing and surface cleaning” be considered brilliantly novel, while “fresh, clean air” is “too simple to be true”?
They’re all simple, low-cost measures, and sensible.
What’s not sensible is propaganda out of all proportion to the threat we face, enforced mask-wearing, enforced business & school closures, and our slide towards a “papers please” society that shuns and shames those who are sceptical of radical new medical treatments that were sanctioned by emergency authorisation and are now pushed upon those who are at very low risk from the disease.
Governments do what they perceive as possible for them to do, but it isn’t always what is needed. The problem is not that they lean towards these totalitarian ‘solutions’, but that they enact them unexamined, and do not honestly evaluate the results. As an exercise, compare the shape of the ‘wave’ centred on January with the current one (eg from WHO web site). A lot has changed since then, but not the way the disease progresses apparently.
Not another throwaway conspiracy theory please! Let’s have a serious conversation.
Katharine Eyre
2 years ago
Another worthy mention in the pantheon of polities come and gone is the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, which was a neighbour to the Lemko Republic. It existed from November 1918 to July 1919 as the collapse of the Habsburg Empire kicked up all kinds of new possibilities. A really fascinating bit of history. If you lived in a town like Drohobycz (in modern-day Ukraine) – it’s quite dizzying to think of the number of different polities and identities you have been a part of in the last 120 years.
Last edited 2 years ago by Katharine Eyre
Ferrusian Gambit
2 years ago
I read that book several years ago. For some reason the republic of Rusyn that lasted a single day in 1939 looms large in my memory.
Andrew Horsman
2 years ago
Why did it take the best part of a year for masking to be prioritised in public health advice? Because that’s how long it took the global cabal to bully decent intelligent health professionals into going along with nonsensical measures that never featured in pandemic planning before 2020, and which are obviously designed to maintain elevated levels of fear and anxiety in the general public as part of their attempted coup.
Seriously, Mr Gooch, please do some basic research on this – maybe then you’ll think twice before adding to this grotesque narrative of fear and dependency.
Alan Thorpe
2 years ago
I doubt that when China and Japan closed their borders to trade and isolated themselves from the rest of the world that they expected the resulting outcome. It didn’t destroy their civilisation, but it did nothing for it. Equally, today’s politicians only see positives coming for policies design to control CO2 which will not have the slightest effect on the climate, but it will have a major impact on costs and energy reliability. China, this time will be the successful civilisation and may well become the dominant world power. Times are changing.
Edward De Beukelaer
2 years ago
Interesting piece but the writer makes the common mistake saying that covid was the pandemic…. I propose that it is the response of the politicians/press/etc that was the pandemic, much more than the virus…
Covid is NOT a plague by any stretch of imagination. Even if some hundred average healthy individuals die, it cannot be categorised as plague. In the context of 7b, it’s not even a ripple of a plague. That’s why there was no need for border control as initially the government was thinking sensibly. Then they fell to pressure and group think. Then it got worse with masks and hand washing.
Historically germs have taken some toll on life but somehow Covid was earmarked as remarkable & worthy of panic. It was just a bit different, not remarkable. Even if it would have taken more people than it purportedly has. Germs are more our friends than enemies. The war on Covid has encouraged us to to remove our friendlies by constant hand cleaning and masking. That is where the long term danger lies. This conditioning will surely have far worse consequences on population and its mindset than Covid.
However we are in a better place than many other nations. I agree.
‘But one very obvious lesson of history is that we are fortunate, even during a plague, to live in Europe in the early twenty-first century‘
In my mind the mistake was to play this drama to the media/mob’s satisfaction. In accepting mistakes( if this lab grown)and some related deaths, we can learn, grow and move forward. In clouding our thinking with denials, panic and judgemental reporting, there is no hope for learning lessons, truth and proportion.
I am increasingly of the view that the media is a malignant influence on politics. On every issue about which I have a reasonable level of knowledge or which I bother to research properly, the media narrative is invariably wildly inaccurate and hinders sensible debate and policy-making.
For a few weeks in Jan and Feb 2020 Boris and Dom Cummings were on to something. Stop playing the journalists “narrative” games by refusing to put ministers up for interviews which they knew would be aggressive and bypass the media outlets with online “People’s PMQs”. They understood a) Lots of high profile journalists wanted revenge for Brexit and would never give them a fair hearing, and b) all outlets are more interested in creating drama than reporting news. Getting involved with that circus was counterproductive. Unfortunately Covid came along and sunk this plan.
At the beginning of the briefing, Johnson tried to get the journalists to disseminate accurate information. They insisted on playing gotcha.
It doesn’t say much for the quality of our MPs and that is the real problem not the media. Plus of course the electorate is easily influence by all forms of the media.
The West as the world knew it is in a War for its very existence. The enemy of the amazingly enlightened, free, intellectual, productive, West are:
MSM, Social Media, The Education industry, the Entertainment industry, the Global Elites, all the Political parties on the Left, all the petty elected hard left bureaucrats, the Marxist CRT< BLM and their ilk, (even centrist left like UK Conservatives) – and they are winning.
It’s worth looking up the Michael Crichton-coined Gell-Mann amnesia in relation to this phenomenon.
I never could discover the point of the article above, or what is was going on about, but it misses Entirely what the deal is:
This is not a plague, but a new thing, a ‘Plandemic’. Covid its self gave zero reason to lockdown, well. maybe 6 weeks to flatten the sombrero to make folk happier, but this was entirely a LOCKDOWN disaster, not a viral one.
The Puppet Biden just had his minions vote in 3.5$ Trillion, on top of 1.5$ Trillion (basically the normal entire year’s budget for USA, and that including huge deficit spending as usual) of insane spending which is pretty much all destructive to freedom, to poor people, middle class people, everyone but the extremely wealthy – it loads them up with swag beyond their greediest dreams of avarice. For the rest it devalues the Dollar, and by the stealth tax of inflation eats everyone’s savings.
Biden is out to destroy the West, much like the Bolsheviks did to Imperial Russia to usher in the age of terror and misery we called the USSR.
COVID was their Tool to do this! The locking up of the production, paying the now unproductive to sit at home consuming Chinese goods rather than making their own stuff – and paying every kind of insanity, keeping interest zero, ruining the national debt to 123% GDP, to 30 Trillion wile destroying the bond market and inflating equities to stratosphere levels – destroying the education, the pensions, the companies, allowing open borders to let illegals take all the jobs from the unskilled
This covid response has nothing to do with health – it is to destroy the West so it can become Communist/Lite, and Nu-Feudalism can become the New World Order (You will own nothing, you will be vaccinated and tattooed to prove it (every 6 months a booster) and you will get UBI of poverty, and you will like it. Or else, as C Schwab said)
Nobody except the most deranged doomsday eschatological cultists ever saw this as civilisation threatening anyway.
True!
I know-it was like if the Titanic was sailing mid Atlantic and someone thought they saw an iceberg so they put the old and inferm into the lifeboats, scuttled the ship, and let everyone drown – just to be on the safe side.
Sorry, but that’s obvious nonsense.
How can “hand-washing and surface cleaning” be considered brilliantly novel, while “fresh, clean air” is “too simple to be true”?
They’re all simple, low-cost measures, and sensible.
What’s not sensible is propaganda out of all proportion to the threat we face, enforced mask-wearing, enforced business & school closures, and our slide towards a “papers please” society that shuns and shames those who are sceptical of radical new medical treatments that were sanctioned by emergency authorisation and are now pushed upon those who are at very low risk from the disease.
Governments do what they perceive as possible for them to do, but it isn’t always what is needed. The problem is not that they lean towards these totalitarian ‘solutions’, but that they enact them unexamined, and do not honestly evaluate the results. As an exercise, compare the shape of the ‘wave’ centred on January with the current one (eg from WHO web site). A lot has changed since then, but not the way the disease progresses apparently.
The governments did this under instruction of their owners, the Global elites, to wreck the Western economy.
Not another throwaway conspiracy theory please! Let’s have a serious conversation.
Another worthy mention in the pantheon of polities come and gone is the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, which was a neighbour to the Lemko Republic. It existed from November 1918 to July 1919 as the collapse of the Habsburg Empire kicked up all kinds of new possibilities. A really fascinating bit of history. If you lived in a town like Drohobycz (in modern-day Ukraine) – it’s quite dizzying to think of the number of different polities and identities you have been a part of in the last 120 years.
I read that book several years ago. For some reason the republic of Rusyn that lasted a single day in 1939 looms large in my memory.
Why did it take the best part of a year for masking to be prioritised in public health advice? Because that’s how long it took the global cabal to bully decent intelligent health professionals into going along with nonsensical measures that never featured in pandemic planning before 2020, and which are obviously designed to maintain elevated levels of fear and anxiety in the general public as part of their attempted coup.
Seriously, Mr Gooch, please do some basic research on this – maybe then you’ll think twice before adding to this grotesque narrative of fear and dependency.
I doubt that when China and Japan closed their borders to trade and isolated themselves from the rest of the world that they expected the resulting outcome. It didn’t destroy their civilisation, but it did nothing for it. Equally, today’s politicians only see positives coming for policies design to control CO2 which will not have the slightest effect on the climate, but it will have a major impact on costs and energy reliability. China, this time will be the successful civilisation and may well become the dominant world power. Times are changing.
Interesting piece but the writer makes the common mistake saying that covid was the pandemic…. I propose that it is the response of the politicians/press/etc that was the pandemic, much more than the virus…